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2015 Wreckages of Whiteness: White Male Sacrifices in the Context of Ritual Redress Josh Inocéncio

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FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF FINE ARTS

WRECKAGES OF WHITENESS:

WHITE MALE SACRIFICES IN THE CONTEXT OF RITUAL REDRESS

By

JOSH INOCÉNCIO

A Thesis submitted to the School of Theatre in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2015

Josh Inocéncio defended this thesis on April 3, 2015. The members of the supervisory committee were:

Nia Witherspoon Professor Co-Directing Thesis

Mary Karen Dahl Professor Co-Directing Thesis

Elizabeth Osborne Committee Member

George McConnell Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

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Dedicated to Fritzi “Oma” Belha-Inocencio, Lenora Cope-Inocencio, Faye Nantz, Myles Cope, Thomas Greenwood, and all my Austrian and Appalachian ancestors

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to take the time to acknowledge certain individuals whose encouragement and support have given me strength during this thesis and throughout my Master’s degree: Mary

Karen Dahl, Elizabeth Osborne, George McConnell, Nia Witherspoon, Lenora Cope and Joel

Inocencio, Jeff Paden, Shannon Hurst, Haddy Kreie, Rebecca Ormiston, Bryan Schmidt, Andres

Robledo, Cody Burroughs, Alison Frost, Chanel Kemp, Kevin Fredrick, Rae “Kingmaker”

Dohar, The War Boys, and the Midnight Laboratory.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………...vi

INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………………...... 1

CHAPTER 1: AN ANALYSIS OF JERUSALEM AND THE ROLE(S) OF WHITE MALE SACRIFICE………………...... 24

CHAPTER 2: AN ANALYSIS OF CATHOLIC REDRESS IN ERIK EHN’S SAINT PLAYS……………………………………………………………………………………………53

CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………………..78

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………..88

Biographical Sketch……………………………………………………………………………...92

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ABSTRACT

Inspired by the plays and performance art pieces of many Latina/o and African American artists who seek to resurrect indigenous beliefs as a method of political resistance, this thesis seeks to imagine possibilities for male individuals of Anglo descent and/or entrenched in a

Judeo-Christian religious context to participate in challenging the violences of colonialism.

Essentially, this is a thesis about religious redress. Therefore, I will explore theoretical precedents for redress set by artists of color, such as Cherríe Moraga and August Wilson, in the

Americas. To bring this into an Anglo context, I will research British playwright Jez

Butterworth’s Jerusalem as a text that situates its protagonist Johnny Rooster Bryon in a

Celtic/Germanic mythological context. I seek to understand Rooster’s actions in the play as a strategy to rectify the violences against indigenous beings that contemporary English society has forgotten and exploited. I will also research two of Erik Ehn’s Saint Plays to examine how he deploys Catholic characters and their sacrifices in relationship to Native Americans.

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INTRODUCTION

Many African-American and Latina/o playwrights explore the notion of sacrifice as an act of redress that links characters with their ancestral pasts and rehabilitates an active relationship with the environment. Perhaps the most famous example is August Wilson’s Joe

Turner’s Come and Gone, a play set in Pittsburgh that chronicles the journey of the African-

American wanderer Herald Loomis as he searches for spiritual satisfaction and his former wife.

In the play, both Loomis and the boarding house tenant Bynum use blood sacrifices1 to bind themselves with their ancestors, the environment around them, and, more subtly, the West

African Yoruba orisha.2 In the final moments of the play, Loomis “slashes himself across the chest” and finds his “song of self-sufficiency,”3 breaking away from the spiritual and psychological damage he experienced in bondage. In exploring the work of Xicana performance artist Celia Herrera Rodríguez, Irma Mayorga argues that “redress revisits loss, demanding retribution, and a setting right of those wrongs.”4 These wrongs implicitly refer to the displacement of indigenous peoples from their homelands and suppression of native religious practices, which are the central violences that I explore in my own work. Using Saidiya

Hartman, Mayorga examines how the performance of redress can refute (neo)colonial oppression and (re)establish a community-centered people that is mindful of both ecological harmony and

1 In Joe Turner, Bynum mainly sacrifices pigeons and other small birds, but Loomis’ main sacrifice is when he slashes open his own chest near the end of the play. In Bynum’s case, he works closely with the earth as “rootworker.” Loomis doesn’t actively awaken a relationship with tilling the earth, but his experience with his own shine and his confidence in wandering on his own throughout the Northeast indicates the closeness he has achieved to the environment through his sacrifice. Shining, after all, is a natural, cosmic experience, as he becomes more in- tune with the god(s) within. 2 The Yoruba orisha are a pantheon of divine beings that represent various elemental phenomena. In The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson, Harry Elam argues that in Joe Turner, Ogun is the most prominent orisha who manifests himself through the actions of the men in the play. Elam writes, “The African descendants that Wilson describes are the descendants of Ogun, and it is his powerful presence that they must rediscover” (Elam 173). 3 August Wilson, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (New York: Penguin Group, 1998), 93. 4 Irma Mayorga, “Re(a)d Roots: Grounding History, Identity, and Performance in the work of Celia Herrera Rodríguez” (San Jose: National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies Annual Confference, 2001), 197. 1

an egalitarian relationship between genders. Further, Mayorga writes that Rodríguez’ “praxis does not build from a subtle methodology of feminine subversion, satire, or innuendo, but rather, performs a forthright feminist critique of the intersectional loci of gender, history, land, memory,

5 and culture made visible in the tautness of her work’s minimalist symbolic lexicon.” In this thesis, I encourage the reader to examine the productive possibilities of religious sacrifice in relationship to its necessary role in the process of redress.

I arrived at this project during the first year of my Master’s degree through researching

Latina/o and African-American playwrights in coursework and private conversations with my thesis mentor Dr. Nia Witherspoon. I was interested in how Latina/o and African-American playwrights and performance artists were deploying their pieces as forms of political resistance against imperialism and capitalism, especially as a way to heal past violences against indigenous populations. However, in my preliminary research, I wondered whether any white, Anglo playwrights were incorporating a similar methodology in their pieces in order to make redress for not only indigenous peoples in the Americas and Africa, but also for the Celtic/Germanic and other native groups in Europe that preceded the Roman Empire and Judeo-Christian states. Of course, it is not uncommon for playwrights in the United States or England to imagine mythic pasts, but I also searched for artists who validated the sacred beliefs of an indigenous cosmology as part of accomplishing redress. Interestingly enough, my journey started with J.R.R. Tolkien’s mythic imagination in his Middle Earth series, particularly The Hobbit, which tries to map a concrete indigenous past and national identity for England. This seedling evolved into my exploration of playwrights, such as Jez Butterworth, Caryl Churchill, Erik Ehn, Howard Barker,

5 Ibid., 196. 2

Howard Brenton, among others, who confront Anglo violence against various indigenous groups in their work.

With the definitions of Hartman and Mayorga, I am particularly interested in redress that initiates the reclamation of ethnic identities and accompanying religious practices. Redress in the way I use the term goes beyond reclamation in that it not only resurrects cultural practices that colonial forces have discarded, but, as with Rodríguez’ work, “is a search for an alternative consciousness to destabilize the histories of hegemony and oppression.”6 This kind of redress is particularly illuminated by sacrifice, because it requires vulnerability from the subject who seeks to repair colonial violences through reclaiming their culture. As Hartman notes in Scenes of

Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, “redressing the pained body encompasses operating in and against the demands of the system, negotiating the disciplinary harnessing of the body, and counterinvesting in the body as a site of possibility.”7

However, there is a larger theoretical problem with applying Hartman’s ideas to the white subjects in this project, considering she is specifically addressing the African-American slave body in 19th century United States (just as Mayorga is addressing the marginalized Native

American body), and acts that “defied constraints of everyday life under slavery.”8 These acts of redress, according to Hartman’s analysis, include the enslaved body deploying “tactics such as work slowdowns, feigned illness, unlicensed travel, the destruction of poverty, theft, self- mutilation, dissimulation, physical confrontation with owners and overseers that document the resistance to slavery.”9 These acts consist of ways for African-American slaves to aggravate the authority of their white masters within the overreaching parameters of slavery. This thesis does

6 Mayorga, 201. 7 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 51. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 3

not consider slavery directly, and the protagonist in Jerusalem is unequivocally white and male and thus possesses racial and gender privileges, respectively; yet his subjectivity as a social outcast who has invested in a culture that English nationalism has disgregarded positions him as a violated body. Despite this inconsistency between Hartman’s and Maryorga’s focus with mine,

I will explore the extent to which the characters in Jerusalem and Erik Ehn’s Locus and Cedar can make redress through sacrifice with their social privileges in mind. These ideas of redress and their attention to the body is important because it helps us to understand how sacrifice is predicated upon a social inequality or imbalance that exists with the hope of restoring equilibrium.

In the best representation of what I seek to explore in this project, Moraga’s Heroes &

Saints and The Hungry Woman: A Mexican Medea center on women who claim agency in the sacrificial process to redress patriarchal violences of both the Aztecs and the continuing gendered inequalities in the worlds that Moraga creates. Moraga uses sacrifices in both of these plays that re-appropriate Aztec and Catholic cosmologies as well as explode Western notions of violence and religion. Specifically, in The Hungry Woman, a dystopic play that situates the

Greek myth in a Chicana/o context where Jasón has expelled Medea from the reclaimed Aztlán for her lesbian relationship with Luna, Medea makes a cosmic shift through the sacrifice of her son Chac-Mool as she seeks redress not only for Jasón’s betrayal, but also for the primordial violence of the Aztec sun god Huitzilopochtli on his moon goddess sister Coyolxauhqui. This ancient conflict between men and women begins the perpetual battle between the sun and the moon each day. Tanya González argues that Medea reaches the “Coatlicue State10—the entrance

10 Gonazález takes this concept of the Coatlicue State from Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. Anzaldúa writes, “Coatlicue is a rupture in our everyday world. As the Earth, she opens and swallows us, plunging us into the underworld where the soul resides, allowing us to dwell in darkness” (68). Later in the chapter, she also writes 4

into the depths of one’s soul to commune with the deity marked by violent sacrifice, but offering rebirth.”11 While this violence is particularly troubling because a mother kills her child, Moraga emphasizes the possibilities of rebirth that can emerge with this violent, sacrificial act. This rebirth, which results in Chac-Mool’s return to assist Medea “home” functions as a redress for the daily struggle between masculine and feminine forces in both the mundane world and the cosmos. Returning to González, Medea’s sacrifice ultimately does “something monstrous in order to give life or perpetuate the cycle of life that the patriarchal order would attempt to diminish.”12 Even though Medea commits infanticide, she has obtained the approval of the gods who assist the process and she ultimately ushers in eternal life for both Chac-Mool and herself.

While both people of color and white playwrights and performance artists have consciously deployed sacrifice as a method of redress,13 it is not nearly as common to read work by white playwrights who engage with indigenous cosmologies in order to make retributions for institutional racism, cultural genocide,14 and (neo)colonialism. Taking my cue from Moraga’s project, this thesis will explore the possibilities for white people to accomplish redress through the performance of sacrifice for the violent acts that colonialism and genocide have enacted on marginalized peoples. I will examine the play Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth and two Saint Plays

Coatlicue is the “goddess of birth and death” and she “gives and takes away life; she is the incarnation of the cosmic processes” (Anzaldúa 68). 11 Tanya González, “The (Gothic) Gift of Death in Cherríe Moraga’s The Hungry Woman” (Berkeley: MALCS, 2013), 65. 12 González, 66. 13 Redress, which initiates the reclamation of ethnic identities and accompanying religious practices. 14 In his book Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, the historian Ben Kiernan writes, “Not covered by the [United Nations] convention, though, is cultural genocide, or “ethnocide”—imposing a new culture on a group, for instance, by the enforcement of educational or linguistic restrictions, without necessarily causing physical destruction or biological disappearance” (13). Of course, while this brand of cultural genocide has been fundamental to European policies against indigenous groups within the European continent, the physical extermination of these peoples has been instrumental to Modernism as well. 5

by Erik Ehn15 to understand and complicate how these playwrights represent white male sacrifices as potential acts of redress, “demanding retribution” from social institutions, such as the Catholic Church,16 that have orchestrated colonial violences. In contrast to the common theoretical move to capitalize on the invisibility of whiteness as the human norm pointed out by

Richard Dyer, these plays make “whiteness strange”17 by rendering it visible in specific religious contexts that focus on ethnic pasts. Richard Dyer, in his book White, advocates making whiteness strange in order to rupture the racial tenet that “white people are just people.”18 He writes that, because “whites are everywhere in representation,” they are represented to themselves not “as white, but as people.”19 The characters in these plays call for a political urgency that seeks to dismantle genocidal violence’s command for people to forget the sacred and mythological pasts of Europe.

Similar to Diana Taylor’s suggestions in The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing

Cultural Memory in the Americas, I argue that through the reclamation of these traditions, white bodies have the potential to become “co-extensive”20 with their environments and ancestors, ultimately dislodging whiteness from a position of power. When white people of European descent recall their indigenous heritages, they can resurrect a respect for the environment that will challenge normative capitalist practices that harm ecosystems. In reference to the play Yo, también hablo de la rosa (I, Too, Speak of the Rose), Taylor writes, “Cultural memory is, among

15 I will primarily use Cedar for this thesis, but I will also reference Locus. I will briefly discuss Wholly Joan as well. 16 In this thesis, the religious institution I will primarily refer to is the Catholic Church, not because I do not wish to call out Anglican and Protestant belief systems, but because the Catholic Church is most pertinent to my assessment of Erik Ehn’s plays. The role of the Anglican Church is trivial in my analysis of Jerusalem, since it was largely the Catholic Church that suppressed indigenous belief systems in the British Isles. 17 Reference to Richard Dyer’s White, 4. 18 Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 2. 19 Ibid., 3. 20 In The Archive and the Repertoire, Diana Taylor asks, “How does one come to inhabit and envision one’s body as coextensive with one’s environment and one’s past, emphasizing the porous nature of skin rather its boundedness?” (Taylor 82). 6

other things, a practice, an act of imagination and interconnection[…]The Intermediary’s consciousness links historical moments: México D.F., capital of the contemporary Mexican

Republic, México-Tenochtitlan, center of the ancient Mexica Empire.”21 In Taylor’s example, there is a resonance between the colonized Mexican capital that was built from the ruins of the

Aztec empire, which can ultimately rebirth the indigenous nation.22 The same is possible for

Rooster who imagines a utopic, indigenous life in the woods, and for Ehn’s characters who imagine afterlives that push the boundaries of a strict Heaven-Purgatory-Hell structure in

Catholic theology. Nonetheless, Jerusalem and the Saint Plays still present problems in their re- hashing of the trope of the white man as the universal stand-in for humanity, and masculinist representations of sacrifice that devalue the potential roles of women.

The role of the sacred is crucial to understand in the performances of sacrifice for this project, as Butterworth’s Jerusalem and Ehn’s two Saint Plays are both grounded in specific religious contexts. While Richard Dyer writes on the religious elements in Christianity that have historically empowered whiteness (such as, European imperialism and dichotomies between light and dark imagery in the Bible), Dyer does not, however, posit that the Christian scriptures or the lives of Catholic saints are viable places to return to weaken the systemic oppression to which whiteness is attached. This is perhaps because Whiteness Studies, like much of Performance

Studies, takes a secular worldview for granted, forgetting that “performance” for many people of color functions as a “necessary means to an end—a tactic to communicate with ‘the divine’ in

21 Taylor, 82. 22 In Virginia Grise’s play blu, the main characters discuss how Mexico D.F. is falling and the indigenous structures are emerging from the ground to reassert themselves. Hailstorm says, “when the spaniards came, they built their churches over our temples. but now the lake is draining, their churches sinking but our temples aren’t. our temples are emerging from under the earth”, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 12. 7

order to gain knowledge to improve life in the world”23. In her dissertation Water Songs, Spell

Books, and Land Rites; The Reparations of Ceremony in Diaspora, Nia Witherspoon, argues, in other words, that performances can have actual ontological effects.24 Though Ehn and

Butterworth’s characters are for the most part white, they refuse to accept a secularized cosmos or destiny, and instead hail spiritualities that challenge Westernized views of religion. We can then understand the characters in both Butterworth’s and Ehn’s plays to be communicating with a cosmos that is very much alive, especially when they commit acts of redress. Therefore, their redressive actions have the potential to resonate throughout the natural environment and healing can take place between individuals (i.e., men and women or white people and people of color), as well as between humans and other sentient beings (i.e., the earth, plants, animals, and the gods).

Since the European Enlightenment, scientists and other academics have relegated the

“sacred” to refer to irrational, inferior, or purely fantastical ways of knowing, especially within systems of thought outside Christianity. While Enlightenment thinkers, such as René Descartes, initially reinforced Christianity as a rational religion, they ultimately departed from it and instead formulated deism, and later, atheism, as the most rational views about the cosmos.25

Commenting on India, Akeel Bilgrami describes the rising role of rationalism:

[…]the notion of rationality, which was first formulated in the name of science in the seventeenth

23 Nia Witherspoon, Water Songs, Spell Books, and Land Rites; The Reparations of Ceremony in Diaspora (Stanford: Stanford University, 2012), xii-xiii. 24 While Witherspoon explicitly refers to indigenous performances across the Americas and Africa, I plan to use this view of ritual action in my own thesis to better understand the performances of Rooster in Jerusalem and St. John in Cedar and John the Baptist in Locus. 25 While Enlightenment rationalism found its roots in Christianity under scientists like Descartes, Lata Mani writes that, ultimately, “the forking of the secular and the sacred was inaugurated by the Enlightenment project at the turn of the eighteenth century. Enlightenment thought extolled reason and science as the best means of improving society and of ending political despotism and the tyranny of ‘blind faith and superstition.’ It was a complex intellectual enterprise, internally differentiated and vast in scope. Its central ideas continue to underwrite current conceptions of modernity. Post-structuralist theory developed an important critique of the coercive aspects of Enlightenment thought. However, it has left undisturbed two of its key interlinked tenets: the presumption of the sacred as inevitably superstitious and regressive, and the arrogation to the secular of all that is defensible from a progressive perspective” (87). 8

century and developed and modified to practical and public domains with the philosophers of the Enlightenment, had within it the predisposition to give rise to the horrors of modern industrial life, to destructive technological frames of mind, to rank commercialism, to the surrender of spiritual casts of mind, and to the destruction of the genuine pluralism of traditional life before modernity visited its many tribulations upon India.26 Bilgrami notes that the West’s glorification of scientific rationalism has contributed to nothing less than genocide. Through this lens, matter is inert and incapable of consciousness. Western thinking has privileged rationalism over the sacred, consigning religious beliefs (especially those of indigenous peoples) to merely “primitive” practices that contain no relevance for 21st century societies. Bilgrami ultimately calls for a “re-enchantment” in the West that reincorporates a sacred understanding of nature. This idea of “re-enchantment” informs my analysis of the plays as they seek to resurrect religious cosmologies and repurpose them for political projects that involve the queering of rationalism’s dominance in academic discourses, among others.

This thesis proposes that returning to ethnic and religious pasts is a possible way to make whiteness visible and dislodge it from its position of power in the world. This may sound like a lofty goal, since it seeks to dismantle white supremacy. However, I have witnessed the redress process by playwrights of color in their work to both subvert (neo)colonial structures and reclaim their own heritages that white colonialism has suppressed. Through this kind of ethic, I propose a similar possibility for European ethnicities, even if they inevitably inhabit a different subject position. In my chapter on Jerusalem, I utilize the return to Celtic/Germanic myths as a way to rattle the Avon council that seeks to destroy Rooster’s forest home. While readers may immediately recall the Nazi Party’s gross appropriation of Germanic mythologies, I wish to make clear that I am aware of this violent use of European indigenous religions, and I will distance my project from this through an emphasis on the eco-centered aspects and the pivotal

26 Akeel Bilgrami, “Occidentalism, the Very Idea: An Essay on Enlightenment and Enchantment” (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 2006), 394. 9

role of the Earth Mothers, such as Freyja. Ralph Metzner, a researcher on Celtic/Germanic religion, writes,

The conclusion that emerged for me from my reading on the origins of Nazism was that Hitler and his followers basically appropriated certain themes and symbols they claimed to have found in Germanic prehistory and myth for their own ideological, propagandistic purposes. Although they claimed that these cultural themes were part of the ancestral genetic heritage of Nordic Aryans, in actuality this claim was based on a fantastic mishmash of racial and occult speculation that has no basis either in facts of genetic biology or in the religion and worldview of the ancient Germanic people.27 In Metzner’s view, the Nazi appropriations that have tainted the Germanic religions were twisted to serve their eugenic agenda that focused on a limited understanding of the warrior gods and their berserker modes, such as Odin’s preparations for battle through a self-induced dance-like ecstasy. Metzner’s defense, and rightly so, is contingent upon the Nazi’s radical misinterpretations of the Odin myths, among others. To assure readers that my own project does not slip into a similar ethnocentrism, I echo Lata Mani who insists that “understood properly, then, the spiritual journey is a harmonizing of the relationship of humans to the phenomenal world—fellow beings, plants, animals, etc.”28 There is no ethical reclamation without a devotion to the value of every life on this planet, and white people cannot hope to honor the gods of Old

Europe and attending religious practices if they do not maintain a politic that is ecologically aware and seeks to combat environmental racism.

If there is a re-appropriation of these Celtic/Germanic29 mythologies and ritual practices, perhaps Anglos can assist other indigenous groups in resisting imperial normative structures. In

27 Ralph Metzner, The Well of Remembrance: Rediscovering the Earth Wisdom Myths of Northern Europe (Boston: Shambhala, 1994), 25-26. 28 Lata Mani, SacredSecular: Contemplative Cultural Critique (London: Routledge, 2009), 91. 29 While this thesis will not present objects of study that examine the redress process for Slavs, Scots, Gauls, Baltics, and ethnicities across the Mediterranean, I propose that it is an ethical duty as well for them to reclaim their own ethnicities as a way to antagonize imperialism, institutional racism, sexism, and cultural genocide. My thesis will focus on Germanic and Nordic possibilities because the parameters of this project allow for me to give in-depth attention to only a few ethnicities without glossing over important historical and cultural nuances that each European ethnic group carries. As the reader may note, my examinations of Germanic and Judeo-Christian religious practices 10

fact, this return to ethnicities is perhaps a necessary rite of passage. Moraga writes, “ultimately, all of us, (white people included) have to go home to our own ‘tribes’—our home cultures—and make progressive change there specific to our historical cultural conditions.”30 There is a political urgency in dismantling systemic oppressions enabled by colonial structures; yet, as

Moraga notes, we must respond to our specific historical conditions. This includes attending to our specific heritages, but also confronting the tragedies that our ancestors have enacted against other ethnicities and races. These historical conditions include violences against women, people of color, and any dissenter from Judeo-Christian belief systems in Europe. European colonialism and cultural genocide have oppressed women and people of color and bolstered white people, elevating them to positions of privilege.

While sacrifice is central to the plays in this thesis, I want to make clear that I do not wish to romanticize the violent act of sacrifice, and I certainly remember the violences that religions have caused throughout the world. Many self-proclaimed rationalists in the West have called for the obliteration of religions, insisting that evolution indicates we need to move beyond such

“primitivism.” However, a Western understanding of religion and the historic uses to which the

West has deployed it can mark this view.31 Mani asserts that “there is also abundant evidence of religion’s capacity to energise human imagination and action[…] of resistance to domination.

Religion has even been crucial to challenging injustices perpetrated in its very name.”32 This thesis explores the works of artists and religious practitioners who re-appropriate their

are directly tied to European oppressors who have historically maintained the most power as far as colonial and racial dominance is concerned. 30 Cherríe Moraga, “The Salt that Cures/2009: Remembering Gloria Anzaldúa” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 126. 31 This is not to suggest that we all must excuse past wrongs because they are historical, but that we, especially those who are white and practice dominant religions such as Catholicism (and have been forced to practice through compulsory conversions), must actively acknowledge these wrongs and seek to correct them as we move forward in this century. 32 Mani, 18. 11

cosmologies and transform them into a political activism that resists colonial oppressions, sexism, institutional racism, heteropatiarchy, cultural genocide, etc.33

Bringing in social and political critiques of whiteness to usher in the possibility of resistance, Richard Dyer notes throughout his landmark text, White, that representations of white men in art, literature, and film have functioned as a “universal stand-in.” This notion of standing in, as Dyer’s work helps us to understand, is intimately related with the act of sacrifice. Dyer argues that whiteness is largely invisible, at least among white people, while other races have become deviations from the “human norm.”34 To the white gaze, “other people are raced, [white people] are just people.”35 This European view of whiteness stems not only from white colonial structures that have dominated indigenous peoples of the Americas, Africa, Australia, and Asia, but also from whiteness’ association with the transcendent Christian body that is not bound by race. Dyer writes,

At some point, the embodied something else of whiteness took on a dynamic relation to the physical world, something caught by the ambiguous word ‘spirit’. The white spirit organises white flesh and in turn non-white flesh and other material matters: it has enterprise. Imperialism is the key historical form in which that process has been realised. Imperialism displays both the character of enterprise in the white person, and its exhilaratingly expansive relationship to the environment.36 To elucidate this point, white people (i.e., men) are the closest to Christ who sacrifices himself for the whole of humanity, regardless of race or gender. Even though the historical Christ is

Middle Eastern and therefore not white, painters throughout the Middle Ages and the

Renaissance sanitized his appearance with their ghostly white portrayals of the deity. Dyer further notes that “black people can be reduced (in white culture) to their bodies and thus to race but white people are something else that is realized in and yet is not reducible to the corporeal, or

33 Mani also writes on Liberation Theology in the Americas, which “embraced Jesus not just as a redeemer but as a liberator of the poor, and posited social justice on earth as a core Christian concept” (19). 34 Dyer, 1. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 15. 12

racial.”37 Within Dyer’s argument, since white men are attached to the Christ spirit that ultimately leaves the body and its desire behind, they can ignore racial implications by viewing themselves as beyond race. In the context of sacrifice, then, the white male body can easily become a substitute for other racialized and gendered bodies, as it has claimed the agency to speak for the whole of humanity.

Though Whiteness Studies has confronted the social constructs of whiteness in relationship to race, class, and gender, it does not adequately address the role of the sacred as a viable way to dismantle whiteness’ power, much less using religious sacrifices as forms of redress. Richard Dyer, Tim Wise, and David Roediger, all godfathers of the field, deploy social critiques through a secular lens. For example, Tim Wise focuses on the social capital that whiteness carries and legalistic advantages. In his autobiographical White Like Me, he writes,

Even white folks born after the passage of civil rights laws inherit the legacy of that long history into which their forbears were born; after all, the accumulated advantages that developed in a system of racism not buried in a hole with the passage of each generation. They continue in the present.38 Within the framework of undoing racism, Wise suggests that white people must come to terms with their histories of oppression and understand its complexities in relationship to communities of color, emphasizing that “whiteness, of course, requires a lack of context[…]To whiteness, the past is the past and the present is the present, and never the two shall meet.”39 His work, along with Dyer’s and Roediger’s, will inform this thesis through their efforts to render whiteness visible to white people in social scenarios, facilitating a consciousness that agitates the dominative power structures. Their techniques for analyzing trends of whiteness, especially in

Dyer’s work, influence the ways in which I will analyze the visibility of whiteness in Jerusalem and the Saint Plays. I will, however, buttress the work in Whiteness Studies by exploring the

37 Ibid., 14. 38 Tim Wise, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (Berkeley: Soft Skull Press, 2011), 4. 39 Ibid., 246. 13

work of several Critical Race theorists who write on acts of redress and remembrance in people of color communities.

Scholars working at the intersections of Race/Ethnicity Studies and performance have been more amenable than those in Whiteness Studies to the examination of the sacred and its potential for inciting political changes.40 Frequently they acknowledge more fully the cultural productions that employ Xicana/o and West African sacred cosmologies to engender a political radicalism that throws off, or at least resists, colonial oppression. Outside of these contexts, many humanities fields still neglect to effectively question the might of whiteness in mainstream

U.S. American society, and they instead try to facilitate a dangerous space that is “post-race.”41

Instead of the usual paradigmatic trend of using white Western philosophers to validate plays and theories by people of color often put to use in the humanities, I will instead use scholars like

Cherríe Moraga, Harry Elam, Saidiya Hartman, and Diana Taylor to contribute to my understanding of the relationship between white ethnicities and acts of redress.

Since these plays deploy religious sacrifices, Critical Race Theory intervenes as an important methodology for understanding the performative potential of the sacrificial acts. I mention the following theorists, playwrights, and performance artists so that throughout this thesis I can examine the various possibilities of sacrifice in performance. In his essay on Amiri

Baraka’s SlaveShip and Luis Valdez’ Quinta Temporada, Harry Elam discusses the performative

40 In The Archive and the Repertoire, Diana Taylor examines the possibilities of the sacred in indigenous rituals, as she writes, “the extreme reliance on performance constituted the attempts by the Mexica to forestall closure by constantly choreographing the various apparitions, correspondences, and interventions (divine and human) that kept the universe in movement” (39). 41 Analyzing the political arguments of August Wilson and Robert Brustein on the ethics of color-blind casting in the theatre, Brandi Wilkins Catanese argues: “In the color-blind future, therefore, blacks and other minority groups will experience drastically different lives, having been liberated from racial concerns, but whites, presumably, will step unaltered into a postracial America. For Williams, assuming the vacuity of whiteness as a racial category is a problem: whiteness and white privilege are at least as worthy of interrogation as the more frequently marked and problematized terms of racial discourse (nonwhite Others), and any project for moving Americans into a colorless (or color-blind) future must think critically about how the transformation of American racial culture unavoidably includes disrupting the salience and power of whiteness” (35). 14

power of rituals that these playwrights designed in order to incite political action from the audience. While ritual and ritual reenactment does not have to have a particular political agenda,

Elam distinguishes the “socially-committed” pieces of Baraka and Valdez from Peter Brook and

Richard Schechner who “actively researched tribal rituals and sought to recapture the essence of ritual in their performance work,”42 often appropriating cultural practices in their obsessive pursuit of collective origins. Focusing on Valdez and Baraka, Elam writes, “recent ritual theory and research have documented that rituals are capable of formulating values and inducing action in their community. During times of crisis, rituals can become a means of redressing social strife.”43 The ritual sacrifices in each play that I assess address a community imbalance that requires the reintroduction of ritual.

While the plays I examine in this thesis are grounded in a particular ritual context and they recall ritual images that have survived in the mediated source-text, each playwright also introduces new elements that address contemporary issues. As Elam emphasizes, “when schisms in the primal community were irremediable, redress often took the form of revolution.

Disgruntled groups would invoke new rituals aimed at establishing new belief systems and a new social order.”44 Elam applies this leap from traditional to new ritual practices to Baraka’s and

Valdez’ theatrical pieces that sought to reinvigorate the social histories of African-Americans and Chicanas/os and empower them with a political motivation to antagonize systemic oppressions at the local and national levels. Elam’s engagement with both Ritual Studies and

Critical Race Theory informs my own efforts to investigate the possibilities of political redress through the performances of Celtic/Germanic and Judeo-Christian ritual reenactments.

42 Harry Elam, Jr., “Ritual Theory and Political Theatre: Quinta Temporada and Slave Ship. (Theatre Journal, 1986), 1. 43 Ibid., 2. 44 Ibid. 15

Similar to Elam’s examination of Valdez’ and Baraka’s works for the possibility of political action through ritual performance, The Cruci-Fiction Project that performance artists

Guillermo Gomez-Peña and Roberto Sifuentes performed throughout California intervenes as a piece that uses the sacrifice of Jesus Christ to offer redress for Chicanas/os in California. They dressed themselves as Chicano versions of the two thieves who die opposite Jesus in Biblical accounts, and they hung themselves on crosses. The flyers for this performance requested that audience members become participants by releasing Gomez-Peña and Sifuentes from their pain on the crosses, many of whom refused to intervene and instead called for others to let the performers die. Through this they would perform (or at least, foreshadow) a ritual act of liberation from systemic oppressions. These performance artists hoped to imbue a political ethic into their piece by reappropriating the most popular religious sacrifice among Chicanas/os in the

United States in their reenactment of the crucifixion that demanded intercession from audience members. The Cruci-Fiction Project deploys familiar imagery with a crucifixion on a Christian cross, and Gomez-Peña and Sifuentes performed “characters” that had been socially discarded by the dominative culture. Gomez-Peña wrote in his brief essay on the piece that this project “was part of larger ‘ritual of spiritual transformation’” and that “these vulnerable communities are in fact being symbolically crucified by the state.”45 Through familiar Christian imagery, the performance artists represented racialized (and gendered) bodies that California had failed to adequately represent, especially in issues regarding the U.S.-México border.

Bringing in a social critique of white colonialism in South Africa, Afrikaner performance artist Peter van Heerden also reenacts the Christ sacrifice in an effort to betray privilege before both white Afrikaner, or Boers, and Black African, primarily Bantu ethnicities, audiences. His

45 Guillermo Gomez-Peña, The Cruci-Fiction Project (Boston: MIT Press, 1997), 147. 16

entire piece is called Totanderkuntuit (“Through-the-other-cunt-out”), which was a nine-day performance installation that moved through various station (or pageant) wagons; however, the piece that specifically confronts the crucifixion is Dag Van die Kruis (“Day of the Cross”).

Through the performance cycle, van Heerden dresses as the Afrikaner trekboer, or “swaggering frontiersman.” Through (re)staging the “reiterative, performative nature of identity as well as to make visible how such figures have been deployed over and over by the Afrikaner Nation

Project to unify and galvanize an ideology of whiteness”46, he ruptures the “ethnomythological” tropes that crystallize Afrikaner supremacy in South Africa. In his portrayal of the trekboer, van

Heerden and his performance partner mock the figure through costumes and satiric sermons.

Like Gomez-Peña, van Heerden invites audience intervention through his crucifixion that mocks nationalist and religious images of Afrikaner identities that have propped up colonial and apartheid practices in South Africa. And like Gomez-Peña’s goals in California, van Heerden seeks to challenge (and dismantle) the privileges of white masculinity in order to facilitate egalitarian political participation with black South African inhabitants in the post-1994 democracy rather than (re)inscribe the same colonial scenarios of exclusion and superiority.

In Dag Van die Kruis, van Heerden paints “Wit Kaffir” (“White Kaffir”)47 across his chest in the outdoor South African heat. Afrikaner audience members reacted hostilely: they accused him of patriotic and religious blasphemy since he placed whiteness on the same level as the abject, “equating the Self with the degraded Other.”48 Van Heerden argues that his work functions as volksveraad (“race betrayal”) that exposes whiteness’ privileges in South Africa, and he says that he holds whiteness up “not in praise of its hegemony[…]but rather as a

46 Megan Lewis, “Abject Afrikaner, Iconoclast Trekker: Peter Van Heerden’s Performance Interventions within the Laagers of White Masculinity” (JDTC, 2012), 15. 47 In South Africa, “kaffir” is a derogatory that white people use to demean black Africans. 48 Lewis, 10. 17

condition for sacrifice…This ritual sacrifice of whiteness must become a feast and celebration, to enable the formulation of a new non-racialized practice.”49 In this representation of sacrifice, van Heerden objectifies the white male body and renders it visible to other white people who quake from anxiety at his blatant condemnation of institutionalized racism. Van Heerden’s mention of a “non-racialized practice” might sound like he is flirting with a “post-race” ideology; however, it extends from his aim to estrange whiteness from social superiority. In another sub- piece, he rebirths himself from a womb where he “pares himself down to a prelinguistic state of

Kristevan chora, that space in which the self and other are indistinguishable” with the primordial, muddy surroundings.50 Megan Lewis argues that in this act he “strips whiteness and masculinity of their symbolic power” and that in “witnessing his naked human form, the audience is given an opportunity to re-imagine what this white man—and by extension, all white

South Africans—can be.”51 Therefore, through constant attention to his whiteness, nationality, and gender in performance, van Heerden attempts to reinvent whiteness in a way that recognizes its violent history. His ritual sacrifice, then, becomes a precursor to redress for all South

Africans.

The theatre is a space where the sacred meets the secular, and where Ehn and Butterworth deploy ritual sacrifice in order to address injustices. As ritual theorist Catherine Bell argues, rituals and myths

suggest that all human beings share the powerful socialization imposed by the sacred, or by the seasons, or by the murder and resurrection of a divine king. Yet just as these mythic accounts of a common experience and universal logic appear to prove unity within human diversity, they also attempt to delineate the broad outlines of what is meaningful human experience in general.52 While Bell emphasizes the diversification of mythologies and how various cultures express their

49 Lewis, 7. 50 Ibid., 19. 51 Ibid., 19. 52 Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 22. 18

own nuances, she suggests that there is something inherently human about ritual performance and its role(s) in crystallizing human societies. In the context of this thesis, I argue that ritual sacrifice remembers a past that violences have oppressed, and it gives the audiences a reason to remember for social and spiritual solidarity. The stakes of a culture’s survival rest in an individual (or sometimes multiple) body that has chosen to enact violence on itself in order to incite change. Speaking to the relevance of performance within religious, particularly indigenous, belief systems, Virginia Magnat argues that “honouring Indigenous worldviews which colonial powers violently attempted to suppress therefore constitutes an important part of the healing process,”53 and that embodied performance is fundamental to this process of decolonizing. Even though Magnat writes as a researcher within performance ethnography, I will consider how ritual theory illuminates my discussion of Butterworth’s and Ehn’s plays through seeking to understand the ontological and social effects of sacrifice.

Methodology

In this thesis, I will examine a host of fields that directly or indirectly contribute to an understanding of redress and its regenerative possibilities for a community, the sacred, the performance of sacrifice, and theory surrounding religious violence. The academic fields that I will draw from include Race/Ethnicity Studies, Third World Feminism, Performance Studies,

Indigenous Studies, Religious Studies, History, and Ritual Studies. I will use texts from each of these fields of study to provide theoretical and historical backgrounds for each of the plays, as well as to account for an intersectional analysis of key moments in the plays. I will deploy an interdisciplinary lens to analyze these play-texts; however, due to limited recordings and

53 Virginia Magnat, “Can Research Become Ceremony?: Performance Ethnography and Indigenous Epistemologies” (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 33. 19

productions of these plays, I will only be able to analyze them as texts and their potentiality for performance rather than their past productions.

It is important to note the limitations of analyzing text rather than the performances of these plays, especially because they represent indigenous and other religious rituals. As Taylor notes in her introduction to The Archive and the Repertoire, performance can “function as an epistemology” and “embodied practice, along with and bound up with other cultural practices, offers a way of knowing.”54 While the “archive” is largely recorded histories in documents, the

“repertoire” is “embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing— in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge.”55 Among many indigenous cultures, performance is valued as highly as writing, if not more. For example,

the extreme reliance on performance constituted the attempts by the Mexica to forestall closure by constantly choreographing the various apparitions, correspondences, and interventions (divine and human) that kept the universe in movement.56 Therefore, without a comprehensive analysis of performances beyond the texts, we cannot hope to fully grasp the potential of these sacrifice. This thesis will lay the groundwork, largely in history, myth, and archaeology, for future projects that can tackle a full range of ritual performance and its potency, not just historical and literary context.

Each play is grounded in particular racial and religious contexts that inform each sacrifice that the characters perform; therefore, the plays represent mediated performances of sacrifice that attempt to re-appropriate past rituals for 20th and 21st century purposes. The plays also respond to specific colonized histories in both the British and U.S. American nations. Instead of choosing two English or two U.S. American plays, I have decided to examine one from each country. Part of this reason is because Butterworth and Ehn are two contemporary playwrights

54 Taylor, 3. 55 Ibid., 20. 56 Ibid., 39. 20

who are addressing indigeneity and white ethnicities in their work. Also, this English/American perspective imagines possibilities for white people in the United States who are of English descent (i.e., the Celtic/Germanic heritages at work in Jerusalem). Ehn’s play explores whiteness in direct relationship to Catholicism, a European religion with many practitioners in the United States, as well as to Native Americans. In Jerusalem, Butterworth deploys sacrificial moments that are reminiscent of the Prose Edda by 13th century skaldic poet, Snorri Sturluson, and the anonymously authored Poetic Edda. I will use these primary sources to establish a cosmological context, as well as Ralph Metzner and Hilda Ellis Davidson who both write on the ritual practices of pagan Europe. Ehn’s Locus reimagines moments from the Christian Scriptures

(i.e., the Gospels) that feature John the Baptist, and Cedar addresses hagiographical writings concerning St. John of the Cross. The historical texts I will use for St. John of the Cross include a look at his poetry, as well as St. John of the Cross: Songs in the Night by Colin Thompson and

St. John of the Cross: His Life and Poetry by Gerald Brenan.

Chapter Outline

Each work in this thesis deploys a sacrificial representation that is both racialized and gendered, and these identity politics inform both the religious and political contexts of the sacrifice. Also, Jerusalem and the two Saint Plays use traditional ritual elements specific to their religious/mythological contexts, creating new rituals that function to serve contemporary political and sacred projects. I will firmly ground every chapter within the historical/religious lineage that the playwright uses, and then I will expound on the possibilities for these sacrifices to make redress within the specific communities.

The first chapter, entitled “An Analysis of Jerusalem and the Role(s) of White Male

21

Sacrifice” situates Rooster in an English lineage of the storyteller/bard figure that is present in

Anglo-Saxon epics as well as Shakespeare plays, such as Henry IV, as well as the Loki deity in

Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda. In this chapter I will argue that Butterworth deploys a specific

Celtic/Germanic ethnicity (along with religious practices) for Rooster that estranges him from normative whiteness by associating him with giants and pertinent mythological scenarios, such as the Ragnarök. Also at stake in the redress process is Rooster’s ethnic identity, for he is not fully “white” in the cleanest sense of the term. Rooster is a Romany (i.e., a gypsy), or at least descends from gypsies since he has a very English name, which suggests that he has wandered from the European continent from a place where those in charge of sanctifying whiteness have, historically, excluded the nomadic Romany.

In my second chapter, entitled “An Apology for White Male Sacrifice”, I look at two Saint

Plays by Erik Ehn, Locus and Cedar. For this chapter, I will open by distilling Dyer’s theories on the Jesus/Mary paradigm for sacrifice and the whitening of Biblical figures throughout

Western art history. I will argue that Ehn makes strides in rupturing white European hegemony through his inclusion of an indigenous woman who plays a necessary role in the salvation of St.

John of the Cross after he is tortured; however, Ehn undermines this inclusion by also

(re)inscribing the trope that places indigenous women in subordinate positions that facilitate white male dominance.

In my conclusion, I will reiterate some holistic observations throughout the plays, but also relate them to larger questions about the representations of sacrifice, interrogating who gets agency in the redressive process. This conclusion is also an opportunity for me to discuss performance possibilities that wish to confront the difficulties in representing white male sacrifices without (re)inscribing dominative, exclusionary tropes that already exist. Therefore, I

22

wish to creatively explore the ways in which we can “make whiteness strange” through representation, as well as my own personal odyssey in risking privilege and encountering this monolith that we must seek to “dislodge” from power.

23

CHAPTER 1

AN ANALYSIS OF JERUSALEM AND THE ROLE(S) OF WHITE MALE SACRIFICE

Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem envisions a possible route of ethnic and mythological reclamation through the character Johnny Rooster Byron who lives in a forest clearing outside the small, conservative community of Avon in western England. The central conflict of the play focuses on the Avon City Council’s demand that Rooster depart his trailer and the forest, since the community considers him a public nuisance and plans to construct new housing on the land.

However, Rooster resists their eviction notices, passing the day away with this “band of educationally subnormal outcasts” who hardly fit in the Avon community themselves.1

Ultimately, after the main antagonist Fawcett delivers the final warning for him to vacate the forest, Rooster, in an act of desperation, bangs an ancient drum that will summon various

Celtic/Germanic deities, giants, spirits, and his ancestors to help him defend his forest dwelling and fend off the Avon people and their bulldozers that approach in the final moments of the play.

Butterworth, however, does not afford the audience a confirmation of whether or not these entities actually arrive; the play ends before any action occurs. Butterworth creates Rooster as an outlaw who primarily associates with people much younger than himself, similar to the Pied

Piper figure in English folk tales. The playwright also gifts Rooster many indigenous2 qualities that are grounded in both Celtic and Germanic lore.

This chapter seeks primarily to configure Rooster as the misunderstood trickster Loki who will usher in the Ragnarök apocalypse at the end of time. Hailing ritual theorist Catherine

1 Jez Butterworth, Jerusalem (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2011), 53. 2 Indigenous is a complicated word to use in relationship to European citizens, considering the only original inhabitants include the Sámi (or Lapps) in northern Scandinavia, the Picts in Scotland, and the Basques in the Pyrenees. This chapter will largely explore the myths and ritual practices of the Celtic, the Germanic, and the Nordic peoples who all, at one point or another, invaded “Old Europe.” However, they also carry the religions that the European Catholic Church would later seek to eradicate in favor of compulsory conversions to Catholicism. Therefore, unlike Catholicism, these ancient religions are intimately tied to the landscape of Europe and a regular creative participation with the environment and its attending gods, spirits, animals, forests, etc. 24

Bell, I argue that Rooster’s actions at the end of the play fall under the rites of affliction that seek to “rectify a state of affairs that has been disturbed or disordered.”3 According to

Celtic/Germanic and even Nordic mythologies, there is an ancient conflict between the Vanir gods, led by Freyja and her brother Freyr, and the Aesir gods, led by Odin, Thor, and Loki.

Within these traditions, the Vanir were the original deities to inhabit and rule the European continent, but the Aesir eventually invaded from the east and Odin became the chief deity in many pre-Christian societies in Europe. This gendered conflict between the goddess Freyja and the god Odin will, according to prophecies, culminate in an epic battle known as the Ragnarök where Odin will lose power and the world will be reborn and re-imagined. As the once nomadic and invasive Aesir gods, the Loki metaphor suits Rooster best, especially in relationship to his sacrifice at the end of the play that seeks to summon beings that have become invisible in 21st century England. More importantly, his sacrifice also yearns to incite a political revolution that ultimately reclaims England’s mythical past that focuses on creative participation4 with the land, active communication with the deities, ancestors, and animal spirits, and even on a renegotiation between sacred and secular modes of thinking that Rooster seeks to collapse in favor of a more immanent understanding of the cosmos. In order to bolster my argument, I will map out the mythology using the 13th century Icelandic poet, Snorri Sturluson,5 who archived stories and

3 Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 115 4 Gregory Cajete, the Tewa Indian and cultural critic, defines “creative participation” as “acts to mediate between the human community and the larger natural community upon which humans depend for life and meaning” (20). While Cajete writes primarily on Native North American cultures, this idea of creative participation pervades many indigenous practices in the Americas, Africa, and Australia. While I hesitate to normalize indigenous experiences or to make sweeping generalizations, I understand that certain philosophical tenets that Cajete illuminates in his writings about how humans should interact with the earth are absolutely consonant with many pre-Christian indigenous practices (including the peoples of Old Europe). I hope to avoid the same violences that Claude Levi- Strauss, Rene Girard, Richard Shechner, and others have inscribed on indigenous cultures; however, there exists some general similarities between these earth religions that should not reduce our understanding of differences between them. 5 Snorri Sturluson lived in 13th century Iceland, and he recorded many Germanic myths in the Poetic Edda. The Germanic scholar Hilda Ellis Davidson writes that Sturluson was a “member of the most powerful Icelandic 25

beliefs that were a bedrock for people who occupied the British Isles, Scandinavia, and portions of western and central Europe. In addition, I will use the Celtic/Germanic scholar Hilda Ellis

Davidson to provide historical theories on how these common religious beliefs permeated huge swaths of pre-Christian European societies.

As Davidson notes in her book The Lost Beliefs of Northern Europe, the people who identified as Celts “left no literature,”6 and while contemporary archaeologists avoid making broad assumptions, they have gleaned some common beliefs and practices that were popular in the British Isles and other parts of ancient Europe. Many of these cultures shared and exchanged cultural practices, which fostered the spread of deities like Odin from central Europe and

Scandinavia to the British Isles. While the “Celts moved in many directions, invading Italy and

Greece,” they eventually arrived in the British Isles.7 The earliests Germanic peoples were a different ethnic group that spoke another language, originating in “northern Germany and souther Scandinavia”8; however, they “also settled in the British Isles” and merged with the

Celts.9 Davidson contests archaeologists who “ignore the strong links that undoubtedly existed between the thought-patterns and world-pictures on which the myths were based.”10 In addition,

families, who took a leading part in politics (resulting in his assassination in 1241), but who was also an historian with an intense interest in the pasts of Iceland and Norway” (8). 6 Davidson, 2. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 3. 9 A recent study by Oxford University’s Peter Donnelly, summed up in The Economist, “looked in detail at the DNA of 2,039 Britons from all parts of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, each whose grandparents had all been born within 80km of each other. They thus, in effect, sampled the distribution of genetic material in the country in 1885[…]before the large-scale internal population movements of the 20th century had had a chance to confuse the issue.” The study demonstrated that there is quite a bit of diversity among the English, and that “there was much interbreeding between interlopers and natives.” In addition, Donnelly argues that “the whole so-called Celtic fringe, of areas in the west and north of Great Britain that were not invaded by the Saxons, is far more genetically diverse than its mythopoeic appellation suggests,” and some northern areas, such as Orkney, “looks Norse.” In concert with Davidson’s views, this confluence of ethnic groups likely fostered the spread and exchange of particular religious beliefs. After all, The Economist notes that the “original Celts occupied a huge swathe of western Europe before the Roman conquest, so perhaps this diversity is not so suprising after all.” 10 Ibid., 4. 26

the Vikings who settled Iceland, which was previously uninhabited by people, resisted Catholic colonization until Norway finally conquered the island in the 13th century. Sturluson’s compendium of mythology, therefore, reflects not only Iceland, by many shared myths and religious practices in northern Europe. Davidson notes that “it is from Iceland that our most valuable material on early religion in the north is obtained,” which is largely because “the government and law system of Iceland was set up by men who were whole-hearted supporters of the old religion of the northern gods.”11 The anonymous Poetic Edda and Sturluson’s Prose

Edda have become the most reliable, compact sources to rediscover the lives of the deities who dominated many mythologies in the British Isles.

Rooster embodies an English indigeneity that seeks to remember a past that contemporary England has neglected; however, like anyone of Germanic or Celtic descent in

England, he comes from peoples who were at one time foreigners to the Isles. Butterworth also situates Rooster as a political rabble-rouser who offers himself for sacrifice in order to defend his homeland, and, ultimately, restructure the social fabrics that oppress his indigenous lifestyle. In the context of Jerusalem, this current English nation has forgotten its indigenous past, which has resulted in ecological devastation through the unregulated building that destroys forests in Avon.

The citizens of Avon (and, more largely, England) do not participate with nature nor do they pay heed to natural entities, such as the giants. Rooster invents a pertinent ritual of affliction for this particular moment and recalls imagery from Loki’s struggles against the other Aesir gods. This sacrifice that Rooster enacts is also specific to a masculine Celtic/Germanic warrior culture associated with the Aesir gods, particularly Odin. Indeed, Rooster summons all masculine spirits and ancestors in order to combat the Avon invaders. Even though Rooster does not die, as far as

11 Ibid., 6. 27

we know, he still jeopardizes his life in a way that suggests he will risk anything for the possibility of reform. His faith in the giants dictates his willingness to subject his life for this sacred revolution.

In Rooster’s case, and in the larger case of Avon, this reparative performance requires forces stronger than humans, as it involves “the intercession of powerful beings to rectify intrusions and imbalances that go beyond the body of a single person.”12 Rooster cannot fix the ecological havoc of Avon on his own, and he must instead summon natural entities linked to the earth (i.e., giants) to assist his political sacrifice. It is key to remember that this political action is deeply intertwined with an indigenous worldview, since Rooster absolutely believes that these creatures will intervene. Rooster infuses a sacred cosmology into his political sacrifice, which is inextricable in this process of redress for the neglected inhabitants (both human and nonhuman) in England. Similar to Loki, he works closely with the giants to execute his ultimate sacrifice.

According to scholar Carolyne Larrington, Loki “is a strangely ambivalent figure, son of a giant and foster-brother of Odin. His loyalties are sometimes with the gods, sometimes with the giants” and “his sympathies are clearly with the giants [and against the gods] and at Ragnarök he will fight on their side.”13 The gods often vilify the giants, who are the “oldest inhabitants of the universe,”14 yet these primordial beings often occupy a neutral yet destructive state reflective of nature’s chaos, such as earthquakes and hurricanes. They “possess wisdom which the gods covet,”15 often the source of their conflicts, and they only ally themselves with particular beings; in this case, Rooster.

12 Ibid., 115. 13 Larrington, xv. 14 Ibid., xvi. 15 Ibid. 28

Rooster challenges Western norms by including the possibility of primordial spirits joining this necessary sacrifice to save the community. There must be intervention from the spirits, and this creates a particular kind of political positionality that presences the sacred and its fundamental relationship to society. According to Bell, outside Western medicinal paradigms, traditional “healing therapies are based on the idea that disease takes root when key social relations—among the living or the living and dead—are disturbed. Reconciliation of these relationships is an important part of what traditional healing is all about.”16 Jerusalem proposes that there is a damaged relationship between humans, their ancestors, and the natural elements.

In the play, Rooster has a singular interaction with the giants. He encounters this primordial being “just off A14 outside Upavon,”17 and after a brief conversation about the weather and the origins of Stonehenge, the giant “went to his right ear, and hanging from it was a this golden drum.18 Big as a kettle drum. He said, ‘This is for you. If you ever get in any bother, or you need a hand, just bang this drum and us, the giants, we’ll hear it, and we’ll come.’”19 This giant does not frame particular alliances among their species, whether they exist or not, but he does offer what seems to be a unanimous commitment to Rooster’s needs. The play does not explain this loyalty to a human, but if my argument in likening Rooster to Loki holds, then it follows that

Rooster’s affiliation with the giants is predicated upon an ancient bond. Following ancient

16 Bell, 116. 17 Butterworth, 57. 18 According to the Northern shamanic practitioner Raven Kaldera, “there seem to be three kinds of drums in the shamanic tradition I am being taught that are useful to the modern-day shaman. The first type is a Worldwaker. These are generally flat frame drums, and are used both for moving between world and for doing divination. Its energy is a combination of Fire and Air. The second type is a healing drum, for healing rituals, and it is cylindrical, made of fired clay like the earth, although wood is a secondarily acceptable medium. Its energy is a combination of Earth and Water. The third is a large drum carved out of a single log, probably stationary, with a whole animal skin as a top. It is used for public ceremonies, and for calling the Dead. Its energy is Earth and Air.” 19 Butterworth, 58. 29

Germanic prophecies, Loki will unite with a host of other “monsters”20 at the Ragnarök and lead a revolt against the patriarchal Aesir deities, such as Odin, who have exploited the matriarchal

Vanir deities and their lands. In addition, while some giants, such as Mimir, have sided with

Odin in the past, I argue that this alliance also extends from the human exploitation of the environment, to which all giants are connected.

According to Sturluson, the Ragnarök, or the Twilight of the Gods, is the end of this world where Loki will defeat the Aesir gods, including Odin and Thor. Sturluson describes this event:

The whole earth, together with the mountains, will start to shake so that the trees will loosen from the ground, the mountains will fall, and all fetters and bonds will sever and break. Then the Fenriswolf will break free. The sea will surge on to the land as the Midgard Serpent writhes in giant fury and advances up on the land.[…]Next Surt will throw fire over the earth and burn the whole world.21 However, the mythology reassures us that after this cataclysm, “the earth will shoot up from the sea, and it will be green and beautiful.”22 The apocalypse must happen in order for a new world to be reborn with the progeny of the old gods, like Odin, who will die in the war. While the giants may live effectively erased in the world of Jerusalem (the play does not afford an in-depth description of their current lifestyles), Rooster insists that humans must reconfigure their interaction with nature and its creatures. As Bell points out, in many indigenous cosmologies, the “human realm is not completely subordinate to the realms of spiritual power; these rites [of affliction] open up opportunities for redefining the cosmological order in response to new challenges and new formulations of human needs.”23 Similar to Bell’s configuration, Rooster does not merely request the response of these supernatural entities; he begs them to attend his

20 According to the myths, Loki fathers three unfavorable children that the Aesir deities, such as Odin and Thor, consider to be monsters: Fenrir, the giant wolf; Midgard, the serpent who coils the earth; and Hel, the goddess of the underworld. 21 Snorri Sturluson, Prose Edda (London: Penguin Group, 2005), 72, 73. 22 Ibid., 77. 23 Bell, 120. 30

sacrifice that seeks to repair the relationships between humans and nonhuman creatures. In fact, the survival of Rooster’s home, at this point in the play, is contingent on the giants’ intervention.

Based on the promise of the giant he encountered and the resilience of his forefathers, he has every reason to expect their arrival. Rooster both performs a new ritual for this event, and he presumably, if my reading of the final moment does mirror Ragnarök, ushers in a new era that will require new conventions.24

Rooster possesses several ethnic identities that he hails throughout the play, including his

Romany blood, Celtic/Germanic cosmologies, and some Judeo-Christian references. While all three of these identities weave themselves into Rooster, I will explicitly focus on the

Celtic/Germanic resonances with Loki and the Ragnarök, since this mythology has the capacity to illuminate Rooster’s greater political agency in his sacrifice. If we are to understand Rooster’s sacrifice as political, then the Ragnarök reading allows for a more urgent understanding related to the recovery of his indigenous worldview. Many of the spirits that Rooster summons in the final scene are also situated in a Celtic/Germanic context, such as the world-tree Yggdrasil. His embrace of pre-Christian ways of knowing is simultaneously a Romany and Celtic/Germanic characteristic. Before his final sacrifice, Rooster tells his son “I’ve got rare blood. Rarest there is. Romany blood. All Byrons have it[…]Remember the blood. The blood.”25 While Rooster

24 While Rooster’s solitary role as a human in the ending is troubling, since he does have fellow human participants with whom he can rally and perform this ritual, he does not trust any other humans other than his ancestors. In one sense, there is a ritual misplacement that Rooster experiences, for, according to theatre studies scholar Mary Karen Dahl, “when rites fail in their effect, a state of sacrificial crisis exists” and “only a new, complete cycle will restore order. In the new order, a new ritual and preventive structure will be founded” (Dahl 8). Rather than the communitarian rituals that the Celts and the Germans practiced, Butterworth’s play proposes that the “individual is able—free—to transform a specific society through political action” (Dahl 10), as well as sacred action that remembers a religious past. Rooster’s lonely sacrifice is problematic because indigenous sacrifices frequently involve the entire community, even if only one person will be sacrificed. 25 Butterworth, 107. 31

has an English surname, he incorporates his Romany blood into his diverse English identity,26 and he praises its rarity as a credit to his survival in Britain. Romany peoples, like Rooster, suffer discrimination in England and other European nations; however, in this moment, Rooster emphasizes the differences attached to this ethnic identification that separates him from being totally English.

Romany peoples, or gypsies as the English often call them, have a checkered history in the British Isles that demonstrates five hundred years or more of oppression. While the English associate the Romany with storytelling, and they feature in the plays of Ben Jonson, Thomas

Dekker, and William Shakespeare, they are also connected to social crises that antagonize the foundations of English society. According to literary scholar Tony Voss, “gypsies, of Hindu origin, seem to have entered Europe in the fifteenth century and Britain in the course of the sixteenth.”27 Starting as early as the 1530s, English legislation began to condemn and expel gypsies back to the European continent.28 The Romany often blended into the lower classes and the English associated them with pre-Christian practices that the government heavily vilified.

Like Rooster, the Romany either travelled frequently, uprooted by the English laws, or lived on the outskirts of society, denied particular racial and class privileges. This longer historical narrative certainly reads well with Rooster’s own association with the outcasts of Avon, and while Rooster may not practice a specific Romany-based religion, his Celtic/Germanic inheritance crystallizes his pre-Christian worldview. While I could argue that Rooster’s adoption of Celtic/Germanic religious practices is a result of assimilation into English culture, it is also

26 According to the House of Names project, “the name Byron reached England in the great wave of migration following the Norman Conquest of 1066. The Byron family lived in Lancashire. The name, however, does not derive from that location, but is a reference to Beuron in Normandy, where the family lived prior to coming to England with the Norman invasion.” 27 Tony Voss, “The Stranger as Story-teller: Gypsies and Others” (Shakespeare in Southern Africa, 2011), 31. 28 Ibid., 31. 32

crucial to remember that Rooster’s commitment to these pre-Christian practices estranges him from urban English society.

There is another racial facet at work in this play, and that is how Butterworth renders whiteness visible through the character of Rooster. I will not argue that Butterworth is consciously making a statement about whiteness more than he is about English masculinity, but in Jerusalem’s embrace of the Celtic/Germanic mythologies, Butterworth inevitably paves a way for white people to think more about ethnic identification in addition to a racial one. In Richard

Dyer’s configuration, a major goal in battling racism is “making whiteness strange,”29 because

“as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm.

Other people are raced, [white people] are just people.”30 By granting Rooster an indigenous belief system, especially one that is so divorced from a Judeo-Christian worldview, Butterworth envisions an identity that is tied to whiteness but is not tied to sustaining the supremacy of white power in England and across the world. Unlike Christianity, which is originally a non-white religion but has ultimately been used in the service of white imperialism and superiority, these

Old European religions are tied to locality. While there is the potential for localized cultures to produce xenophobia and ethnic hierarchies, the hope is that this return to locality will prevent the homogenization of cultures that European and U.S. American imperialist actions have engineered. Instead, a network of local cultures can cohabitate peacefully and attend to specific landscapes. Celtic/Germanic religions, in their reclaimed forms, emphasize an active and peaceful relationship with the environment, egalitarian gender roles, and communication with the

29 Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 4. 30 Ibid., 1. 33

ancestors. The protection of human and nonhuman takes precedence over religious claims to eradicate other ethnic groups or exploit natural resources.31

Butterworth situates Rooster as a male shaman-warrior who has an indigenous claim to the land that urban England has desecrated with its notions of progress fueled by technological expansions. Butterworth does this by giving Rooster a deep awareness of the natural world, particularly the forest where he lives, and a sprightly personality that only youths truly appreciate. However, once they grow too old, they typically condemn him as a bad influence.32

Rooster’s intense commitment to storytelling immediately recalls an Anglo-Saxon bard who performs epic poems, such as Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. His steep exaggerations (we assume) summon images of Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff who is a more secular iteration of an English trickster figure.33 He is the community’s repository of memory, and he can recall seemingly insignificant details about the lives of other characters that even they forget. Butterworth even associates Rooster with specific animal personalities, such as a dog and a werewolf. Likewise, Rooster has an intimate connection to other realities where giants, elves,

31 Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa both reclaim their Nahuatl backgrounds, and they privilege indigenous ways of knowing that empower Third World Feminism, queerness, and environmental awareness. However, like with many religions, the Aztec Empire created its own misogynist hierarchies that led to discrimination between genders as well as environmental exploitation. For both Moraga and Anzaldúa, it is crucial to be aware of a religion’s violent past, and we must sift out that which becomes ethnocentric, xenophobic, sexist, and racist. Therefore, this is an urgent examination that must take place if white people are to return to their own ethnic cultures. Even though Viking and Celtic tribes have committed horrible atrocities, it’s crucial that these belief systems are purposed for ecological sustainability rather than destruction that needlessly infringes upon other human lives. 32 The major exception is, interestingly, the Professor. As an academic, he, in theory, upholds traditional Western knowledge systems that rely on rationalism and empiricism. Yet he willingly questions the BBC program based on Rooster’s firsthand experience with the giants. Not only does the radical anarchist Rooster reinvent knowledge systems, but the Professor, who’s at the height of academic integrity and training, is willing to refute the dissemination of knowledge that comes through corporate corruption. 33 For examples, like the Bard’s hyperbolic Falstaff in his Eastcheap tavern, Rooster always rounds up the “Friends! Outcasts. Leeches. Undesirables” (Butterworth 50). Similar to Falstaff’s admonitions to Prince Hal, Rooster frequently encourages, or at least idealizes, a state of anarchy in England where “we will rise up and ride on Salisbury, Marlborough, Devizes, Calne, until the whole plain of Wiltshire dances to the tune of our misrule” (52). 34

and other spirit-creatures live; and although we do not receive the details, Rooster has even died and traveled to the Otherworld for a few earthly minutes.

Specific to Germanic and Celtic cosmologies, Rooster maintains many parallels to the controversial trickster deity Loki. Rooster parallels Loki in that his revolt against the Avon City

Council ushers in a moment of chaos that will decide the ongoing fate of humans and other beings that inhabit England. There is also an uncanny connection to Loki’s role in leading the

Ragnarök. At the end of the world, or the Ragnarök, where Odin and the other reigning Aesir gods will lose power, these “monsters” will rupture their bonds in which the Aesir gods enslaved them and Loki will lead them. Loki, similar to Rooster, can shape-shift or put on disguises, and for this event he will appear as “a mighty bound giant who will break loose along with wolf and serpent on the last day and lead the other giants in an attack on Asgard.”34 He will attack a place of security; he will assault a place of privilege that has ruled the heavens for ages. Likewise,

Rooster, for the first time that we know, will violently resist the encroachers on this scale.

Though Rooster does not describe what the creatures will do to the citizens of Avon who are attacking him, the pantheon of masculine creatures, particularly the giants, suggests that violence is a necessary facet of this revolution.

Rooster’s storytelling abilities and his tendency to challenge worldviews through this method are consonant with this role as the trickster figure that appears in many indigenous cultures. According to Jesse Byock, a scholar on the Viking Age and Icelandic poetry who edited the Oxford edition of the Prose Edda, while tricksters vary across the world, they are

“found in stories from cultures as disparate as ancient Mesopotamia and the Americas” and “are

34 Asgard, according to Jesse Byock, is the home of the Aesir gods. 35

at times cultural heroes while at other times they are antisocial individuals.”35 Tricksters often deliver crucial knowledge to humans, such as the use of fire, and they are dispensers of both ordered and chaotic energy. Specific to Germanic and Celtic cosmologies, Rooster maintains many parallels to the controversial deity Loki. Just like Rooster, tricksters frequently “live at the margins of society and are neither completely good nor thoroughly bad.”36 Gregory Cajete draws even more poignant parallels in his assessment of the trickster, or cultural hero, who is

“usually responsible for the creation of art or community, or bringing very important knowledge of a ceremony or a way of living.”37 Tricksters have fundamental roles in societies, because they are “intelligent, they are often two-sided, and responsible for dis-creation or destruction.”38

Rooster must remain at the margins of society, especially at the end, since he performs a sacrifice alone and without any communitarian support (other than the mythological creatures he expects to arrive). It is also key to note that Rooster initiates a process of “dis-creation or destruction” that will affect the entire Avon community. His objective is to unmake the damage that unregulated capitalist growth has enacted on the forest.

In concert with Loki, Rooster summons the “monsters” of the earth, including the giants

Gog and Magog, to assist his warfare. The citizens of Avon, and, by extension, all of England, have ruled with a capitalist worldview for so many years that they have pushed all these creatures to near invisibility. Indeed, the citizens of Avon are no better than the invading Aesir gods, like Odin, who have violated the earth and preceding Vanir deities, including the earth mother Freyja. Rooster’s revolt mirrors Loki’s apocalyptic battle, because he fights for the disenfranchised. And while Loki must also die according to the prophecy, he does so by

35 Jesse Byock, Prose Edda, Introduction (London: Penguin Group, 2005), xx. 36 Byock, xx. 37 Gregory Cajete, Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence (Santa Fe: Clear Light Publishers, 2000), 38- 39. 38 Cajete, 39. 36

antagonizing the colonial culture of which he is a part. Before the stage goes to black, Rooster hails his lineage of ancestors, as well as fantastical creatures:

For at my back is every Byron boy that e’er was born an Englishman. And behind them bay the drunken devil’s army and we are numberless. Rise up! Rise up, Cormoran. Woden. Jack-of- Green. Jack-in-Irons. Thunderbell. Búri, Blunderbore, Gog and Magog, Galligantus, Vili and Vé, Yggdrasil, Brutus of Ablion. Come, you drunken spirits. Come you battalions. You fields of ghosts who walk these green plains still. Come, you giants!39 This list includes a mixture of creatures that hail various mythological backgrounds. Woden is the Anglo-Saxon iteration of Odin the Wanderer, and, as I have described above, warriors would summon him in battle for victories. Yggdrasil40 is the Celtic/Germanic world-tree that links all of the natural and supernatural realms together. Brutus of Albion is an ancient Roman hero and friend of Aeneas who the English believe is the first king of England. There are several giants on here, including: Cormoran, an English giant the Jack the Giant Slayer kills; Gog and Magog,

Gentile personalities in the Book of Ezekiel who are enemies of the Jews; Vili and Vé, brothers who fought alongside Odin; and Blunderbore, a Cornish giant who also appears in the Jack the

Giant Slayer tales. While Rooster performs a chant to summon these primordial creatures,

Rooster “relentlessly beats the drum”, which the giant he met guaranteed would inspire an immediate gathering. Rooster does not trust any human to assist him in this revolt, and while the entities he summons cover a variety of beings, he places special emphasis on the “monstrous” giants.

Rooster’s association with the giants in this play extend beyond their brute strength and formidable stature, since giants are the primordial forces of nature manifest in the bodies of these gargantuan creatures. Ralph Metzner, a Germanic religious scholar and practitioner, describes

39 Butterworth, 109. 40 In Asgard itself, Yggdrasil marked the place of assembly for the gods, where decisions were made affecting them and mankind. The fruit of the tree was linked with human births, and was also a source of healing. Yggdrasil was said to grow and to be destroyed continually, as living creatures of the mythological world, hart, goat and squirrel, gnawed at it; this suggests that it symbolized the ever-changing existence of a kingdom or tribe, or indeed of human life on earth (68-69). 37

the giants as “simply personifications of the vast impersonal forces of nature, which can be dangerous to us humans but are not specifically antagonistic.”41 Therefore, Metzner’s statement would suggest that this play is not only about Rooster and the spirits in revolt; it suggests a revolt by all the natural forces upon which Avon (and by extension, England) infringes. Even though the giants are manifestations of nature that do not necessarily antagonize humans, they have formed alliances against people and gods when they are attacked. As I mentioned previously, they join Loki to battle Odin and any of his followers for enslaving and mistreating them. Nature itself is angry and Rooster appeals to it to defend itself against the City Council’s plans.

In fact, the entire earth descends from the original Celtic/Germanic giant Ymir who is forcibly sacrificed to create land. Primordial entities

took Ymir and they moved him into the middle of Ginnungagap and made from him the world. From his body they made the sea and the lakes. The earth was fashioned from the flesh, and mountain cliffs from the bones. They made stones and gravel from the teeth, the molars and those bones that were broken.42 If the giants come to Rooster’s aid, their involvement becomes both an act of vengeance and reparation for this ancient sacrifice, since humanity could only emerge at the expense of the giant

Ymir. And since the very earth which the Avon citizens desolate is from the essence of Ymir, their violation is a direct assault against the ancestor of all giants. In both Celtic and Germanic mythologies, giants are also connected to memory since they descend from Ymir. In fact, the base of the World Tree Yggdrasil contains the head of Mimir who counsels Odin in times of conflict or confusion.

Butterworth recreates many images and scenarios from the Celtic/Germanic religions that situate Rooster as a warrior-shaman figure, which allows him to straddle both sacred and political conflicts that occur in the play. Rooster’s sacrifice attempts to reclaim and materialize

41 Ralph Metzner, The Well of Remembrance: Rediscovering the Earth Wisdom Myths of Northern Europe (Boston: Shambhala, 1994), 203. 42 Sturluson, 16. 38

his Celtic/Germanic heritage in order to resist a secular encroachment into his forest. First,

Butterworth establishes the setting as a sacred space that is more sensitive to receiving sacred energies by the sheer fact that it takes place in a “clearing in a moonlit wood”43 without any significant structures other than Rooster’s ragged trailer. Many temple structures from the

Germanic and Celtic peoples do not exist, because “most of their ceremonies were conducted out of doors, and for centuries their holy places appear to have been in forest clearings, on hilltops, on the shores of lakes or on islands” rather than in any man-made building like the Greeks, the

Romans, or the Christians.44 Nature itself contains an inherent sacredness that a building cannot confine or redirect in any way; therefore, the closer one is to the actual source of sacred energy, the more intimate in their practice they can be. In addition, among the ancient German belief systems, the moon carries a masculine energy, while the sun “has feminine connotations in

Germanic language and myth.”45 The play begins and ends with the moonlight shining down on

Rooster, empowering his actions.

While some of the other characters consistently contest Rooster’s stories, he insists that he lives on hallowed, or at least a mystical, ground. He tells his Phaedra, a young woman from

Avon, that he has “seen a lot of strange things in this wood,”46 including a “plague of frogs,” “a golden stag clear this clearing” with “fourteen-point antlers of solid gold,” an “oak tree cry” and a “beech sing hymns,” as well as “Elves and fairies.”47 He connects the forest to these forgotten entities that exist freely among the trees, which most urban people ignore. Part of Rooster’s sacrifice entails protecting not just his indigenous right to the land, but also the other living

43 Butterworth, 6. 44 Davidson, 12. 45 Metzner, 155. 46 Butterworth, 102. 47 Ibid. 39

beings that inhabit the forest. In fact, even his friend Lee argues that there are “ley lines”48 in the forest, which are “lines of ancient energy, stretching across the landscape. Linking ancient sites.[…]If you was a Druid, this wood is holy. This is holy land.”49 The sacredness of the forest informs Rooster’s fierce defense of it, but it also contributes to his fantastical stories that

Butterworth is careful not to confirm with characters that are from other realities.

For methodological purposes, I have clung to the Prose Edda by Sturluson since it has the most detailed accounts of Odin, Loki, and the Ragnarök, which are crucial to understanding certain aspects of Rooster’s sacrifice and general character in Jerusalem. But I must also emphasize, even with how the Prose Edda has passed into English consciousness, that direct readings of the stories are not absolutely necessary to exert a firm influence on Butterworth’s play. Let us not forget the seminal book The Archive and the Repertoire by Diana Taylor, which argues that “performances function as vital acts of transfer, transmitting social knowledge, memory, and a sense of identity though reiterated, or what Richard Schechner has called ‘twice- behaved behavior.’”50 Therefore, Butterworth may have learned of the myths from the Prose

Edda via other media than reading them in school or on his own. These cultural inheritances crystallize through various media, such as Catholic and Anglican religious practices, character or narrative tropes that appear in Shakespeare or other Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, poetry, and even film. Even though the Roman Empire and then the Catholic Church seized

48 According to Ancient Astronomy: An Encyclopedia of Cosmologies and Myth, “In 1921, so the story goes, businessman Alfred Watkins had a revelation. Standing on a hillside in Herefordshire, England, overlooking an expanse of rural countryside containing a number of ancient features, he noticed that many of them seemed to lie on straight lines. A subsequent examination of Ordnance Survey maps revealed the apparent existence of numerous ancient straight trackways that formed a network of intersecting straight lines stretching from one end of Britain to the other, with ancient sites of various ages situated along them. Noticing that many of trackways passed through places whose names contained the syllable ley, Watkins concluded that the word ley referred to the trackways themselves and named them ley lines. Drawing on the earlier astronomical work of Sir Norman Lockyer, he also concluded that some of the lines were oriented in the directions of sunrise and sunset at the solstices” (Ruggles 224). 49 Butterworth, 72. 50 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 2-3. 40

control of the British Isles, in the process of violently converting the indigenous peoples, the dominant culture(s) inevitably absorb imprints into their own societies and practices. Taylor writes,

transculturation denotes the transformative process undergone by a society in the acquisition of foreign cultural material—the loss or displacement of a society’s culture due to the acquisition or imposition of foreign material, and the fusion of the indigenous and the foreign to create a new, original cultural product.51 While here Taylor is explicitly referring to English and Spanish colonization of the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas, I argue that this applies to the imperial takeover of the Isles as well.

These cultural memories have passed into the British psyche, even if they find different iterations in the work of artists and writers, such as J.R.R. Tolkien.

In exploring Rooster’s connections to Celtic/Germanic mythologies, there arise many methodological issues where the historical record runs blank in its details about particular myths and how Europeans practiced associated rituals. In The Lost Beliefs of Northern Europe, the religious historian Hilda Ellis Davidson outlines the problems that archaeologists face when they embark on a comprehensive study of these religions. Davidson notes that there is “no creed for us to study, no sacred books or descriptions of rituals, no life of its founder, and indeed, little trace of the religious leaders and thinking minds” who fostered the growth of these religions throughout Old Europe.52 The ancient Germans and Celts emphasized an oral tradition through song, poetry, and storytelling over written manuscripts. Most written material on these religions emerges after the Catholic Church converted the Celts and Germans to Christianity throughout the first millennium C.E. Therefore, many writers and poets, such as Sturluson, were Christians who were reflecting back on their heritages and attempting to preserve the beliefs of their ancestors. However, in spite of these hurdles and mediations, Davidson insists that we have

51 Ibid., 94. 52 Davidson, 1. 41

enough “evidence from early art and archaeology in many different regions,” and that although

“this was recorded by Christian chroniclers and story-tellers[…]it has, nevertheless, preserved a good deal of information about pre-Christian traditions and myths.”53 Until we find more sources that further illuminate our understandings, what we can glean from archaeological sources must suffice to inform our knowledge of these religions pursuant to active reclamation in the 21st century.

In spite of these patches, we have found a wellspring of knowledge in the Prose Edda, as his compendium of myths has served as a cornerstone for English writers. Many English, and even U.S. American, poets, playwrights, and novelists have deployed iterations of Sturluson’s stories in their work. Byock has pointed out that Sturluson’s piece has “influenced modern culture, inspiring most notably Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.”54 In fact, Tolkien retrieved most of the Dwarves’ names for his novel The Hobbit from the Prose Edda. Byock continues to list other poets, such as W.H. Auden, Henry

Wadsworth Longfellow, and Jorge Luis Borges, who have integrated the Norse tales into their poetry. I have no knowledge as to whether Butterworth extensively read the Prose Edda, but it is clear that Sturluson’s work has disseminated through popular culture regardless. Byock also suggests pertinent parallels between the Prose Edda and Beowulf, which Butterworth has likely read. Even more, Jerusalem contains several allusions to Tolkien’s Middle-Earth saga, which has borrowed many cosmological elements from Sturluson’s Edda.

Another important archaeological claim that Davidson introduces early on in her book is that we must emphasize the commonalities between the Celts and the Germans. This absolutely fosters our understanding of how Rooster, ethnically mixed and at times ambiguous, can occupy

53 Ibid. 54 Byock, ix. 42

a very specific Celtic/Germanic subject position. It also aids us in understanding that, to a degree, we can pull elements from both Celtic and Germanic mythologies to interpret Rooster’s actions. While stark distinctions do exist in their histories and cosmologies, they share enough similarities, and certainly cultural crossovers, that enable us to perceive contemporary iterations better. Davidson writes that the “tendency now is to see them as distinct cultures, and to ignore the strong links that undoubtedly existed between the thought-patterns and world-pictures on which the myths were based.”55 In the case of England, both the Celts and Germans exerted much influence over the past 2,000 years, since “Angles and Saxons from the Danish peninsula and northern Germany arrived as military war-bands and also as settlers in southern and eastern

England, and absorbed, overcame or drove westwards the Celtic peoples living there.”56 These exchanges and power dynamics are perhaps akin to the transculturation between the Greeks and the Romans in the first centuries B.C.E.; we cannot look at them as the same but there are fundamental similarities that are crucial to our understanding of the two cultures. Especially in the Isles, they mixed so much that we must understand Rooster as a hybrid between Anglo-

Saxon and Celtic mythologies, and the entities that he summons in the final moments of the play are a testament to this syncretism.

A key similarity, even in the later Viking classes, that Davidson notes is that these societies and their attending mythologies were predicated on the “obtaining of victory and good fortune in battle” and that they were often “restless war-bands, run by leaders who had to justify their authority by skill and courage and good fortune in battle if they were to hold the loyalty of their followers.”57 While Rooster embodies a rather unconventional spiritual figure whose views

55 Davidson, 4. 56 Ibid., 5. 57 Ibid., 8. 43

on nature differ strikingly from those who live in Avon, it is a warrior mentality that fuels his religiosity, especially at the end of the play when he prepares to use violence in order to waylay the bulldozers. For Germanic and Celtic masculinities, there is no separation between religious devotion and warrior skills. In this aspect, Rooster shares many characteristics of an Odin follower who “appears in the northern myths in three main aspects, as ruler of the land of the dead, god of battle, and god of inspiration, magic and wisdom.”58 Valhalla, which is a realm

“intended for outstanding heroes to support Odin in the final battle against giants and monsters,”59 is the afterlife space that most commentators and poets wrote about and it is myths about this place on which we have the most information. I broach the associations with Odin in order to highlight Rooster’s connection to warrior culture; however, if I remain committed to the

Loki comparison, I must point out that Loki is Odin’s mortal enemy. For these monsters that

Odin battles ultimately become the allies of Loki, according to Sturluson’s recollection of the prophecies. Additionally, even though Odin is the god of these masculine warrior cults, other male deities, such as Loki and Thor, are entrenched within their practices, too.

Alongside warfare, the art of storytelling in Jerusalem suggests alternative realities and ways of life that Rooster declares to practice, but storytelling in this play also functions as an indicator of communicating the realities of an indigenous worldview, regardless if Rooster speaks literally or metaphorically. Indigenous tribes in Native North America, as well as Old

Europe, have used storytelling to communicate not necessarily the literal truth but an iteration of the truth that becomes accessible to human perception. In Native Science, Cajete writes that

“while all Native myths reflect a metaphoric play of imagination to reflect important relationships between the human and non-human, tales of creation relate how humans have been

58 Ibid., 76. 59 Ibid., 70. 44

formed by and participate with creative forces of the universe.”60 Cajete considers indigenous methods of storytelling to be metaphorically related to fundamental truths that concern human existence, such as evolution, noting that “many of these myths parallel biological theories of evolution.”61 These creative acts, he argues, are essentially impulses from the universe and its inhabitants to express themselves and explain their relationships to other entities, such as the stars, animals, plants, and spirits. In fact, Cajete compares the native language of storytelling to the Arabic numerical system as a means to give shape to the universe.

Rooster utilizes the language of storytelling to communicate particular meanings behind his extravagant birth, and his depiction of the forest creatures, particularly giants, might be wrapped up in coded signifiers as well. For example, Rooster tells the youths in his clearing about his miraculous birth that suggests an almost immaculate conception:

See, my father, Hector Byron, was a philanderer. Loves the lasses. One May morning, he says, ‘I’m off for a walk.’ Now, his wife, who knows his ways of old, tracks the old goat’s scent up the road, round the corner, straight up to the door of her own sweet sister. She crepples inside, up the stairs, into the boudoir, to find sister bent double on a big brass bed, with Hector up the back, in the cheap seats, whooping it up with all his lusty puff. The wife pulls a pistol, draws a bead and shoots the wayward lad slap-bang in the love bells. The bullet passes clean through his scrotum, bounces off the bedpost, zings out the window, down the high street to the crossroads, where it hits number 87 tram to Andover. The bullet passes through two inches of rusty metal, clean through an elderly lady’s packed lunch and lodges in my sweet mother’s sixteen year-old-womb. Eight months, three weeks, six days later. Out pops him. Smiling. With a bullet clenched between his teeth.[…]All Byron boys are born with teeth. Thirty two chompers. And hair on them’s chest. No wailing or weeping. Talkin’, straight off. This one—me—he sits up, wipes the dew from his eyes and calls, ‘Mother, what is the dark place?’ And she replied, ‘’Tis England, my boy. England.’ And with that, I jumps off the bed, and out the door, and off I marched in my little black cloak.62 This story is a testament to the absolute insistence on “Byron boys” being born, and their degree of agency in the process. The story also sacralizes his birth as he mentions earlier that his mother was a virgin when she became pregnant with him. There is a sacred energy that apparently guides all Byron men, which perhaps foreshadows Rooster’s integral role in

60 Cajete, 35. 61 Ibid. 62 Butterworth, 49. 45

defending the land near the end of the play.63 If we also read the “dark place” as an extension of his mother’s womb, then we can understand a more vital feminine role that empowers Rooster, at least within his own family line. Yet Rooster is able to flee the hospital room, and he disavows any need for a mother to nurture him. It is interesting that from the moment that Rooster is born, he recognizes the tragic, urban condition in which England exists. His life quest, or purpose if you will, becomes about returning England to an indigenous past that can, perhaps, relieve it from its modern ills. Rooster’s life then centers on the enlightenment that comes with reclamation.

Perhaps the most unsettling story Rooster tells that baffles his followers is his interaction with a giant, which explains how he has obtained the mysterious drum but it also calls into question what 21st century NEWS stations and other media are willing to report on. Rooster describes a moment where he travels near the interstate around Upavon and witnesses a giant

“gazing out over the land, watching the sun rise.”64 Much to the dismay of Ginger, Rooster casually insists that this giant was “maybe forty, forty-five feet seated. So ninety, a hundred foot. Give or take” and that “in passing” the giant mentioned that “he built Stonehenge” which is, of course, one of the most sacred and enigmatic structures in all of England.65 The most important bit of information that Rooster provides, which foreshadows the final moments of the play, is when the giant

went to his right ear, and hanging from it was this golden drum. Big as a kettle drum. He said, ‘This is for you. If you ever get in any bother, or you need a hand, just bang this drum and us, the

63 While this story can certainly be read as a rape that both Byron men indirectly enact on this sixteen-year-old woman, it also emphasizes the role of destiny for Rooster to be born. This moment does contribute to Butterworth’s overall devaluation of women in the play, because his mother is merely a vessel on Rooster’s route to his sacred purpose to save England. Additionally, this story privileges Rooster’s masculinity since he escapes his mother’s womb with a full set of teeth, a cloak, hair on his chest, the ability to speak, and the cognition to recognize England for what it is: a dark place. 64 Butterworth, 49. 65 Ibid., 58. 46

giants, we’ll hear it, and we’ll come.’ Then he headed off down the vale, and I watched him walk clean across the land, north towards the motorway, until he was off in the distance like a pylon.66 Naturally, some of the characters are resistant to believing Rooster’s tale, primarily Ginger who insists that “If a ninety-foot giant walks from Land’s End up to Salisbury Plain in the blazing spring sunshine[…]It’s at the very least going to be on BBC Points West. At the very least.”67

While a handful of the characters concur with Ginger, it is interesting that Davey questions this logic with his insight that “Points West used to be solid local news. First they’ve done the cuts, merged with Bristol, now it’s half the bloody country,”68 implying that the business side of the media has influenced the local program to make sacrifices in favor of larger capitalist interests.

Ironically, the Professor agrees with Davey, noting that “in broadening its net it’s saved on costs at the—some would say—greater cost at a level of editorial focus.”69 The most haunting point that Davey broaches is that Points West missed the giant because “they was too busy merging with BBC Belgium,” 70 commenting on how globalization effaces local issues and marvels.

Ultimately, regardless if the characters believe this story, many of them realize that they cannot trust all that BBC provides them in its limited reporting that must focus on political interests as well. The media functions as an act of colonization that ignores pre-Christian identities of

England by instead focusing on the rest of world, recalling Britain’s imperial purview.

The media in this play is useless when it comes to reporting astonishing information, and the characters, within and without the play, remain ignorant to these sacred entities that exist and they even doubt the primary accounts from Rooster. In her collection of essays SacredSecular,

Lata Mani notes that “News Channels CNN and BBC and the internet may give us access to a

66 Ibid. 67 Ibid. 68 Ibid., 59. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid., 60. 47

variety of news sources but they do not equip us to interpret what we see or read.”71 These mediated bits of information that television watchers and Internet users see on a daily basis only provide people with a general sense of the world rather than an understanding that raises consciousness beyond mere facts. There is also the intense secular nature of NEWS that is at stake here, since, in the world of Jerusalem, they neglect to represent sacred knowledges that might reconfigure people’s views on nature and how to preserve it. Indeed, the characters in

Jerusalem are quite uncomfortable at the existence of giants, which renders their sense of rationality useless.

In the final moments of the play, Rooster seeks to repair England through both a sacred and political sacrifice that will redirect the community, returning it to a more ecologically aware state. Rooster no longer relies on his small community nor does he perform any specific

Celtic/Germanic rituals to prepare for this sacrifice other than the banging of the drum. He must perform a ritual that he does not completely know, that his body only vaguely remembers. He knows that he craves justice and that he must intervene in order to re-infuse sacred knowledges into Avon’s, and more largely, England’s, consciousness. Rooster seeks a better position in the world for himself, but more importantly he seeks to correct historical violences. In The Past as

Present in the Drama of August Wilson, Harry Elam, Jr. argues that Wilson deploys acts of redress in his play in order to rectify past wrongs that white U.S. American culture has perpetrated against African-Americans. Elam writes, “there is not simply a matter of unfinished business with the past but a hunger for redress and regeneration in the present.”72 In Jerusalem,

Rooster seeks not only to revisit these historical violences against the land and primordial

71 Lata Mani, SacredSecular: Contemplative Cultural Critique (London: Routledge, 2009), 168.

72 Harry Elam, Jr., The Past as Present in the Drama of August Wilson (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006), xiv. 48

entities, but he yearns to reconfigure England’s current society by enlisting these giants to battle alongside him.

Rooster engages in a war that has never finished, and his body brings ages of memories to this sacrifice. Even his relentless banging of the drum, his tossing of the ashes, and his trance- like recitation of the ancestors and other entities recalls the berserker modes that Odin’s warriors would work themselves into for battle. These states of being included “a reckless confidence in battle” where the warriors “knew no fear when fighting and were impervious to the pain of wounds.”73 Metzner, who has experimented with this state himself, writes that the berserkers

“were said to be in a kind of ecstatic trance, a holy rage, when they rode into battle, howling eerily, disdaining shields, and inspiring terror in their enemies.”74 The animal and the human fuse in this ecstasy, and the warrior requires almost no armor or assistance other than fellow berserkers. This act is ingrained in Rooster’s blood memory, which Elam defines as “the idea that there are some intrinsic experiences, some ontological knowledge” that people carry, which cannot necessarily be put to language.75

While Butterworth focuses on masculine rituals and their pertinence to indigenous reclamation, the women characters fulfill typical stereotypes, and Butterworth does not afford us any time to empathize with them despite Rooster’s morally problematic character. In her introduction to The Feminist Spectator as Critic, Jill Dolan, building upon the work of Laura

Mulvey, writes that through “scopophilia (pleasure derived from looking), voyeurism, and fetishism, the male spectator is able to identify with the film’s active male protagonist and

73 Davidson, 99. 74 Davidson, 75. 75 Elam, xvii. 49

simultaneously disarm the threat posed by the image of the ‘castrated’ female body.”76

Grounded in a Lacanian-based psychoanalytic theory, both Mulvey and Dolan suggest that the male spectator of a film, television show, or play experiences a “pleasure” or identification when viewing the male “ego-ideal” that he witnessed in the “mirror phase.”77 Dolan also argues that women can also occupy this empathetic viewpoint for men, since the media inundates its programs with white, heterosexual male protagonists who are written as more complex characters than women.

While there are a host of female characters throughout Jerusalem, Phaedra, the 15-year- old woman who goes missing, poses potentially the most interesting intervention into how

Butterworth constructs women, and she offers an opportunity to redeem Rooster. Phaedra is probably the most enigmatic character as well. She initiates Acts I and II in the play with a song:

1) a rendition of William Blake’s poem “Jerusalem”, and 2) “Werewolf” by Barry Dransfield. In the play, Phaedra is the winner of the previous St. George’s Day beauty pageant, and it is her duty during the course of the play’s action to pass her crown to the next winner. However, she is missing the entire play while her father and other men in the town fervently search for her.

While the audience sees her in the beginning of each act, we do not discover that she is hiding in

Rooster’s trailer until Act II. Her presence in Rooster’s trailer creates extreme discomfort because she is only fifteen years old. Since Rooster has hidden Phaedra from her father during the search, there is a suggestion that Rooster has coerced her to be there, and there might be an immediate sexual implication between the two of them. However, given that Rooster provides shelter for the forgotten and abused youths of Avon, Phaedra likely sought refuge in his trailer and Rooster therefore functions as her protector.

76 Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1991), 14. 77 Ibid., 15. 50

During their final and only encounter in the play, Rooster and Phaedra save a fish’s life, discuss the magic of the woods, and dance together by her order as the May Queen. It is important to note that Phaedra is “dressed as a fairy” throughout the play,78 and she seems to possess some sort of magic as she is the St. George’s May Queen for a few more minutes before she is supposed to bestow the crown on the new one. This ritual identification as the May Queen empowers her, and she even claims a degree of authority in the presence of Rooster when she commands him to dance with her.79 Their moment, however, does not last long as Phaedra’s father, Troy Cox, appears with a gang of men, as well as “a blowtorch and a branding iron.”80

Phaedra flees and the men attack Rooster inside his own trailer, and “eventually the door opens and the MEN run away.”81 They fight Rooster, and after they leave, he exits his trailer physically injured; yet the time they use to beat Rooster allows Phaedra to run away, demonstrating Rooster’s sacrificial devotion to her. This is consistent with his trickster abilities as well as his enduring need to perform the ultimate ritual that will summon the giants. Indeed,

Phaedra’s presence and her safety empower Rooster and foster his survival. Even in Rooster’s worst moment, he still emerges for the final confrontation with Fawcett and everyone else that doubts his sacred connection to this English forest.

Unlike preceding political English playwrights, like Arnold Wesker, Edward Bond, and

Howard Brenton, Butterworth deploys the sacred to bolster a political revolution that will cure

England. Rooster hails a pre-Christian, indigenous cosmology that will ultimately enable his cultural survival and the return of a society that honors nonhuman entities. Ultimately,

Butterworth complicates the relationship between Rooster’s whiteness and his ethnic

78 Butterworth, 5. 79 Ibid., 104. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid. 51

subjectivity. The persisting issue with this tension, which Dyer points out, is that focus on

“white ethnicity” can sometimes “lead away from a consideration of whiteness itself.”82

Therefore, while Rooster occupies an oppressed space that estranges him from dominant white

English society, it is key to remember his identity as a white, heterosexual man in this critique.

The hope, as I will demonstrate with Ehn, is to rupture whiteness through a focus on ethnicity; however, this should not suggest that whiteness and its history of privileges can so easily disappear, regardless of what redress white bodies make to reclaim their own indigenous cultures.

82 Dyer, 4. 52

CHAPTER 2

AN ANALYSIS OF CATHOLIC REDRESS IN ERIK EHN’S SAINT PLAYS

In the previous chapter, I explored Jerusalem’s recuperation of Celtic and Germanic cosmologies in order to make redress for a religion which both Catholic and Protestant

Europeans have oppressed. Erik Ehn’s plays, Locus and Cedar, in distinction, challenge the monolith of Christianity more broadly, and Catholicism specifically, examining Judeo-Christian colonial violence against indigenous peoples in the Americas in order to (1) confront genocides and (2) explore the controversial lives of many Catholic saints. Instead of reinscribing traditional hagiographic narratives that valorize saints at the expense of non-Christians, Ehn seeks to repurpose Catholicism’s relationship toward indigenous bodies in his plays into one of cohabitation and cultural recriprocity. Ehn also portrays women’s relationships to sacrifice with more complexity than Butterworth. As Ehn outlines in his Saint Plays anthology, which includes

Locus and Cedar,

The subject matter is exploded biography, or the means by which the self is overmastered by acts of the imagination, by acts of faith. The landscape is Christian according to the accident of my spiritual education, but the plays are religious chiefly in the sense that they look at individuals as inappropriately cast in division.”1 Through this spiritual “accident”, Ehn resourcefully responds to his religious upbringing and uses his “home” culture in order to craft redress for individuals that the Catholic Church has oppressed. Rather than viewing his religion as an absolute path to salvation for everyone in the world, Ehn reconfigures his religion to respond to past violences, suggesting that we should deploy our cultural environments in order to achieve redress with others. Ehn’s language on an

“accident of birth” suggests a view of Catholicism that provides a spiritual connection with some form of philosophical truth, but is also oriented around social constructs, and, by an extension, social action.

1 Ehn, ix. 53

In this chapter, I seek to situate Ehn’s plays Locus and Cedar as possible paths to redress for Catholics who are implicated in the Church’s violent history against indigenous populations in the Americas. Both plays deploy native bodies, a Native American athlete in Locus and an iteration of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Locus, that provide crucial knowledge to John the Baptist and St. John of the Cross, respectively. I will provide a brief history on salient European views on Native Americans, particularly from the Catholic Church in Spain which engineered much of the intial violence in the Americas. This chapter will also examine how Ehn deploys women characters who are very prominent in relationship to the sacrifices that the male protagonists perform in each play. A female counterpart accompanies each John before his impending sacrifice (Salomé and the Virgin of Guadalupe, respectively), and they play integral roles in ushering the Johns into the next stages of their existences. While I argue that these plays make

(white) redresses for the Catholic Church’s violences against indigenous peoples in the

Americas2, they simultaneously make redresses for women who have historically suffered exclusion and oppression in many Catholic social spheres. However, as Ehn seeks to grant agency to Salomé in Locus and to the Virgin in Cedar, he still reinscribes rather colonial and patriarchal roles for the women that hinder their potential in the process for redress.

In his Soulographie anthology, which succeeds the Saint Plays, Ehn includes various plays on genocide (but not specifically saints) and Catholicism that seek not to provide any didactic commentary, but rather to explore the connections between Catholicism and genocide throughout Catholic history. He writes,

[Soulographie] is twenty years of dramatic writing on genocide, spread across seventeen plays, presenting an array of perspectives[…]in various styles[…], directed in cities ranging from Kampala (Uganda) to Warsaw (Poland) to San Francisco, Minneapolis, San Diego, Washington DC, Providence, Bronxville (New York State), and New York City (Brooklyn and Manhattan),

2 Both plays feature a prominent Native American character that intimately participates in the life/death of the protagonist. 54

staged by seventeen directors, supported by an extensive team of producers, dramaturgs, designers, managers, and other collaborators. Genocidal crimes are constructed to be unspeakable and they are maintained that way, defended from an accountability to the fabric of reality and historical memory.3 Therefore, in an attempt to reconcile with a religion that has orchestrated 2,000 years of violence toward marginalized groups, Ehn’s larger political project that seeks to mine out the humanitarian aspects of Catholic theology in order to tackle genocidal crimes all over the world.

This chapter will examine how Ehn represents white male sacrifices, which refuse to take whiteness for granted as a universal representation of humanity. While Ehn writes his plays within a Catholic context, he decenters a Catholic worldview as the only way of understanding the cosmos and religious truths. The presence of Native American characters in both plays challenge the supremacy of Judeo-Christian belief systems, and they demonstrate alternative

(i.e., indigenous) ways of knowing through dream visions, an intimate relationship with nature, and death as part of a cosmic cycle rather than a definitive teleological jump into an afterlife.

In Locus, Ehn suggests that John the Baptist,4 a native to Roman-occupied Palestine, is asleep (or dead) and dreams that he is in a foreign, future land, which we discover is the U.S.

American southwest in the 20th or 21st century. Accompanying his visionary journey is King

Herod’s5 daughter Salomé, who John wants to baptize despite her resistance, and Jim Thorpe, the

Native American athlete who won Olympic gold medals in 1912 for the pentathlon and

3 Ehn, 67. 4 According to the Judeo-Christian Gospels, John the Baptist, like the Jewish prophet Jeremiah, lived in the wilderness of Judea where he baptized individuals in order to prepare for the coming of the Messiah. In the Gospel of Matthew, the author writes that John called for people to “Repent, because the kingdom of heaven has come near!” He would wash people’s sins away by baptizing them in the Jordan River, and they would confess their past wrongs and proclaim reliance on the Messiah and his offering of spiritual salvation. John lived simply in the desert and subsisted on “locusts and honey,” as he awaited the arrival of Jesus of Nazareth. In chapter fourteen of Matthew’s gospel, Salomé dances for King Herod, and, as a reward for pleasing him, she demands: “Give me John the Baptist’s head here on a platter!” even though, according to the scriptures, Herod “regretted” this decision. According to this gospel, Herod had already imprisoned John the Baptist, because he was an upstart who possessed supernatural powers, and thereby disturbed the peace. He also imprisoned John the Baptist, because John challenged his marriage to “Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife”, claiming that “It’s not lawful for you to have her!” 5 According to the Gospel of Matthew, “Herod, when he saw he had been outwitted by the wise men” on the whereabouts of the rumored Messiah (i.e., Jesus), “gave orders to massacre all the male children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old and under” (Matthew 2:16) . 55

decathlon competitions6. While Ehn incorporates many surrealistic images throughout this short play, such as a wolf eating the moon, the basic plotline follows John the Baptist as he gathers the strength to greet his inevitable beheading. In contrast to this Biblical setting, Cedar is set in 16th century Spain where Ehn envisions the Spanish saint’s arrest shortly after he co-conspires an uprising in Ubeda with St. Theresa of Avila. He wastes away in a prison until the Mexican iteration of the Virgin Mary, the Virgin of Guadalupe, visits him in order to help him pass away from the material world. While John believes the Virgin will provide an escape route from the prison, she instructs that she will help him “to die in here, John. John of the Cross.”7 Guadalupe does not seek to continue John’s earthly life; rather, she will help him die, and thus, become a political and religious martyr. Neither John the Baptist nor St. John of the Cross can confront death without first reconciling their lives with indigenous Americans.

In Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality, historian Morris Berman proposes an “immanent” understanding of the cosmos, which he associates with hunter-gatherer societies, rather than a “transcendent” one, which permeates agricultural civilizations. Berman argues that this immanence in hunter-gatherer societies involves “heightened awareness, not ‘burning bush’ experiences. In this worlåd, the secular is the sacred, which is all around us.”8 These two worldviews, immanence and transcendence,9 are the conflicting cosmologies that I find in Locus and Cedar; the Native American characters in both plays represent an immanent consciousness that values sacredness in the environment while the European Catholic characters represent a

6 Thorpe later lost these medals after the Olympic validation committee discovered that he played semi-pro ball during his Olympic tenure. Ehn’s play references this moment, exploring it as a continual theft of Native possessions by white, U.S. society. The committee returned the medals to Thorpe after his death. 7 Erik Ehn, Cedar, in The Saint Plays, ed. Gautam Dasgupta and Bonnie Marranca (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2000), 131. 8 Morris Berman, Wandering God (Albany: State University of New York, 2000), 11. 9 Essentially, Berman argues that transcendance is a vertical perception, rather than a horizontal one, “with the mundane world regarded as being down here, below, and heave up above” (Berman, 12). Therefore, the sacred is displaced into an unattainable sphere rather than intrinsically existing in the earth. 56

transcendent one focused on “ascent experience.”10 The acts of redress in the play seek to validate an “immanent” understanding of the world, and they culminate through the sacrifice that each John makes. Saidiya Hartman’s comments, the idea that redress “is a search for an alternative consciousness to destabilize the histories of hegemony and oppression,” help us to understand how Ehn subtly incorporates contested relationships with indigenous lands and cosmologies into Locus and Cedar. While Hartman explores acts of redress in the lives of

African-American slaves in 19th century United States, Ehn uses redress in order to repair relationships between Catholics and indigenous peoples by reconciling their cosmologies (or at least, create a space where they can cohabitate).11 In both plays, there are moments when the

Catholic protagonist becomes subordinate to wisdom that a Native American character offers to him. Ehn demonstrates the expansive learning that Catholics can achieve from the indigenous characters. Each John struggles to prepare for their sacrificial moment that they know is impending, and a Native American helps them make their sacrifices. Therefore, redress occurs when these Catholic saints must rely on indigenous knowledge in order to complete their sacrifices.

Ehn’s protagonists are not only Catholic, but they are distinctly white men of European descent. According to David Savran, white masculinity must come to terms with both racialized

10 In Berman’s Wandering God, he writes, “In any case, we see that the structure of religion in civilization, particularly Western civilization[…]is a vertical one, with the mundane world regarded as being down here, below, and heaven up above. Starting at some point around 2000 B.C., and accelerating in the so-called Axial Age, after 1000 B.C., this verticality acquired its own dichotomy, a sharp division between the sacred and the secular, with salvation being a promise held out by the sacred sphere.” 12. 11 In this way, Ehn’s work echoes 16th century Mexican playwright Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’ The Loa for the Auto Sacramental of The Divine Narcissus, which creates a space for the Mesoamerican natives and the Catholic colonizers to exercises their religions together and in peace. According to Diana Taylor in Stages of Conflict: A Critical Anthology of Latin American Theatre, Sor Juana “is turning to the Mexica worldview, rather than the European, to find a solution” to the conflict between the Spanish and the Nahuatl. Noting that Catholics “were reluctant to accept the possibility of any similarity between their religion and what they claimed was pagan devil worship”, Sor Juana boldly emphasizes the similarities, such as blood sacrifices, rituals predicated upon eating, and sacred performances (Taylor 84). 57

and gendered Others (and, by an extension, their worldviews), which frequently overlap, in order to understand the privileges that whiteness has over other bodies. Savran theorizes in Taking It

Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture that “racial difference, in particular, is a powerful force for the production of any gendered identification and that the latter, in fact, remains incomprehensible unless understood[…]as an implicitly racialized term.”12 In Locus, Jim Thorpe, a Native American, and Salomé, a female dancer from the New

Testament gospels, both accompany John the Baptist’s spiritual journey as he seeks to understand his visions in the desert as well as baptize Salomé. While John the Baptist receives visions of other U.S. American icons, such as singer Buddy Holly, it is his dreams of Thorpe’s indigenous practices that possess the potential to radically reconfigure his relationship to nature and his understanding of a Judeo-Christian worldview. The presences of Salomé and Thorpe challenge John the Baptist’s authority and overall subject position as a white, heterosexual prophet in the United States. In Cedar, Ehn deploys a subaltern racialized and gendered identity with the Virgin of Guadalupe who defies St. John of the Cross’ expectation of release from prison. In line with Savran’s logic, both Johns must negotiate their white subjectivity in relationship to both indigenous and female characters in order to relinquish the power and privileges of their worldviews.

Ehn’s depictions of Biblical and hagiographic characters in many of his plays are predicated upon the Western whitening of both Jesus and the saints in the visual arts and film.

While John the Baptist is a man indigenous to Palestine, Ehn paints him as a white man dislodged from his homeland and thrown amid a variety of mostly white, U.S. American icons.

In White, Richard Dyer discusses the lineage of how whiteness accrued symbolic ethical and

12 Ibid., 8. 58

religious meaning throughout Western art history, particularly during the Renaissance. Dyer argues,

Marking of otherness by skin colour is also present in the depiction of Christ and the Virgin Mary. Increasingly, they are rendered as paler, whiter, than everyone else. This is most evident in the two set-pieces of Christian art, the nativity and the crucifixion. In the former, Christ and Mary are so white that they give off light which illuminates the darker coloured faces of the shepherds, Magi and even Joseph, none of whom have the transcendent whiteness of Christ and Mary. In crucifixion paintings Christ’s body may also give off light, but it may also be less glowingly, more cadaverously white. All those around, except Mary, are darker, though not necessarily uniformly.13 While many Renaissance painters whitened the disciples and subsequent saints, regardless of their ethnic heritages, Dyer notes that there is often a color distinction between “enlightened, saved Jews” like Jesus and Mary and “pre-Christian” Jews, which included John the Baptist and his mother Elizabeth. While painters still depicted John and Elizabeth as white, they were noticeably darker than Jesus, his disciples, and post-Ascension apostles. Dyer also maps out the

Christian religion’s marriage to white supremacy in Europe, and while Dyer notes that

Christianity is not exclusively a white religion, he situates it as a “religious export” of white

Europe.14 He argues that even though Christianity today is “most alive in Africa, South America and the black churches of Europe and North America,” it carries resonances of whiteness consonant with European imperialism. The lingering effects of white Christianity remain in:

The persistence of the Manichean dualism of black:white that could be mapped on to skin colour difference; the role of the Crusades in racialising the idea of Christendom (making national/geographic others into enemies of Christ); the gentilising and whitening of the image of Christ and the Virgin in painting; the ready appeal to God of Christianity in the prosecution of doctrines of racial superiority and imperialism.15 The primary reason to whiten iconic deities and the early followers of Christianity is to exercise power over particular racial groups, especially in instances of colonial contact. This dichotomous racial categorization has been a convenient way for white colonial settlers to exercise dominance over Native Americans, Africans, Aboriginal Australians, etc. If,

13 Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 67. 14 Ibid., 17. 15 Ibid. 59

historically, Europeans could argue that their spiritual proximity is tied to their whiteness (as

Renaissance paintings suggest16), it was easier, in their own minds, to argue that they have a superior consciousness, and therefore a superior right to land, to other people in the world who have darker skin.

In both Locus and Cedar, the Johns grapple with female agency, and they find conflict in their expectations of how women should perform particular spiritual roles. While St. John of the

Cross ultimately accepts the Virgin of Guadalupe’s instructions, John the Baptist resists

Salomé’s ability to make her own decisions until his beheading in the final scene. Dyer constructs the paradigmatic models for gender ideals that he claims Christianity espouses to regulate men and women’s religious capacities. Within Christianity, Jesus is a model for the ideal man and his mother Mary is a model for the ideal woman. Paralleling the Christian ideals for women, “Mary is a vessel for the spirit; she does nothing and indeed has no carnal knowledge, but is filled with God.”17 This requires a certain degree of passivity, especially in contrast to men who must express a more active range of suffering. For men, “the model is of a divided nature and internal struggle between mind (God) and body (man), and of suffering as the supreme expression of both spiritual and physical striving.”18 In this ideal, Christian thinking values suffering as a form of spiritual endurance and awakening. This culture requires men to suffer and even valorize their pain, while women must silence their suffering with no small degree of grace. In this way, men can play out their pain onto the receptacle female body. Ehn’s

16 The effort to paint white representations of Christian icons was not the only move during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment to sanitize historical figures. In The History of White People, Nell Irvin Painter writes on how Europeans constructed whiteness as the ideal beauty. In fact, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68), an art historian, whitened many ancient Greek statues that were originally dark in color. He did not realize that many Greeks “routinely painted their sculpture” (Painter 61). Therefore, “Winckelmann elevated Rome’s white marble copies of Greek statuary into emblems of beauty and created a new white aesthetic. It would apply not only to works from antiquity, not only to Greek art, but to all of art and all of humanity” (61). 17 Ibid., 16-17. 18 Ibid., 17. 60

John the Baptist silences Salomé’s discomfort with his visions, forcing her to listen to his spiritual struggle. Similarly, St. John of the Cross expects that the Virgin of Guadalupe will liberate his (male) body so that he may continue political reform; however, she is there to end his mortal life. This dynamic exists not only between white men and women, but also, and perhaps especially given the distribution of power, between white men and indigenous women. Within this logic, colonizers can easily map the role of the silent sufferer onto indigenous bodies.

As historian Ben Kiernan notes in Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and

Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, the Spanish colonizers frequently debated the spiritual and even human status of Native Americans within a (white) Catholic cosmology. In 1550, the

Franciscan priest Bartolomé de las Casas, in favor of legal protections for Native Americans, debated Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who found Indians sub-human, in Valladolid, Spain.

However, despite

Las Casas’s efforts, his victory in the Valladolid debate, and the outcry from other missionaries, the cult of antiquity, imperial ideology, and race prejudice of Spanish court intellectuals like Sepúlveda helped legitimize extraordinary colonial cruelty, contributing to the genocidal outcome.19 The history demonstrates that a minority of Catholic priests fought on behalf of indigenous peoples in the Americas; however, the initial doctrine of the Catholic Church stomped out the views of las Casas and others. Therefore, often in the name of mission work, the Spanish empire subjugated Native Americans despite the ethical voices of figures like Las Casas and Diego

Durán. This relationship between indigenous peoples and Catholicism is certainly one of the most controversial components of 16th century colonialism, as it devalued Native American ways of knowing and interpreting the world. Mission work, executed by the Spanish in the name of

19 Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 99. 61

Jesus, violently silenced native voices, which is where Ehn intervenes to reopen a dialogue between Catholic and indigenous belief systems.

In Locus, John the Baptist experiences a series of visions that function as little narrative vignettes. These depict several U.S. American icons, such as Jim Thorpe, Buddy Holly, Elvis

Presley, and Sleepy LaBeef at crucial moments in their lives. The dreams are simultaneous with visions of his impending death. John, like Jesus of Nazareth in Gethsemane20, seeks to escape his sacrificial destiny by imploring Salomé to help him. John inundates Salomé with his ethereal visions, which frighten her, hoping that she will sympathize with him and, therefore, deter King

Herod from executing him. In the final moments of the play, John sneaks into a “bar-b-q” where

Herod is cooking and has tied up Salomé as bait to catch John. Fueled by his fervent religiosity,

John wants to baptize Salomé even though she has resisted throughout the play; in addition, she has also warned him to avoid Herod’s presence. This urge to baptize is not only a method to save himself, but also to control, and even colonize, Salomé. While John is certainly aware that

Salomé is bait and that Herod plans to behead him, he insists on sneaking in and fulfilling the baptism at all costs, even his life. Herod recognizes this sacrificial commitment, remarking that

John “can’t resist the most precious head of the girl. The one he is compelled to baptize; compelled by dryness to find water, compelled by water to find the source” despite the limitations of the desert.21 John’s spiritual calling, even in Ehn’s iteration of the Biblical narrative, is to baptize others to prepare for the Messiah, or at least, for a grand apocalyptic

20 In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus prays in Gethsemane the night before his crucifixion, hoping that Yahweh will release him from this duty. He prays, “My Father! If it is possible, let this cup pass from Me. Yet not as I will, but as You will” (Matthew 26:39). Ultimately, he realizes his sacrificial destiny and he surrenders himself to the crucifixion the following day. 21 Erik Ehn, Locus, in The Saint Plays, ed. Gautam Dasgupta and Bonnie Marranca. (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2000), 74. 62

event. But it also seems that his effort to “find water” is fueled by a desire to salvage his beliefs, despite Salomé’s skepticism.

While he is aware of the dangers on entering into this heavily guarded camp, he sacrifices himself to save Salomé (within the context of his own spiritual cosmology, which he believes will liberate both her and himself). Finally, Herod confronts John and he “draws a chef’s knife to decapitate John.”22 As John’s head flies across the stage, he says “the headless body will hunt the head. This ceaseless head, this desire to dance, this wind knocked man. This trout in air in the hand of the bear, this wreck, this water. This daughter. This daughter.”23 Even with romantic undertones in their relationship, this reference to Salomé as “this daughter” implies

John’s desire for control over her. There is no mention of John’s journey to the afterlife, or even his own salvation; instead, Ehn suggests that he wanders in spiritual turmoil as he longs to rescue

Salomé. This wandering suggests a broken connection between Catholicism and not only

Salomé, but women at a larger level. Throughout Locus, John insists that Salomé resist Herod’s demands for John’s head and instead make a request that she actually wants. This attempt to rescue Salomé is John’s way to rupture her relationship with Herod, even though he essentially attempts to inscribe his own patriarchal control on her. Therefore, the play only offers two options for Salomé: continued enslavement to Herod or a new enslavement to John and his beliefs. She is deadlocked between these two men, yet she manages to make her own decision to behead John the Baptist anyway.

While Ehn’s play references John’s work as a baptizer, Locus largely focuses on the prophet’s visions in the wilderness that ultimately shape his destiny. There is no interaction with

Jesus or even a Jesus character in the play; instead, Ehn hones in on a suggestively sexual, or at

22 Ibid., 76. 23 Ibid., 76. 63

least romantic, relationship between John and Salomé. Salomé voluntarily visits him, and, despite her anxieties toward his visions, she spends “hours looking for arrowheads” to “calm down enough to hear” John discuss his apocalyptic dreams.24 Ehn also shifts the place of blame from Salomé’s bloodlust to Herod’s demands, which decenters the female temptress stereotype and instead makes this an issue tied to masculine violences. Instead, Ehn casts Salomé in between her father and John. In the original Biblical narratives, it seems that Salomé has full control over her decision to take John the Baptist’s head, but in Locus, she is under the influence of King Herod’s tyrannical policies. The gospels actually grant her a greater range of agency; however, Ehn tries to demonstrate the ways in which her decision is influenced by two opposing men in order to humanize her.

While the baptisms certainly reference Christianity, Ehn also fills the play with Native

American imagery, such as Jim Thorpe and a female spirit guide who leads Jim to the water in the desert. The entire play and the structure of John’s experience suggests a Native American vision quest where an individual goes into nature in order to gain knowledge, frequently through fasting, prayer, and solitude. While the experience at first disorients John, and Ehn never explicitly reveals how he arrives there, John is in a constant state of self-discovery. In God is

Red: A Native View of Religion, Vine Deloria, Jr. describes the potential facets that may accompany Native American vision quests:

The vision quest of many of the tribes is primarily an individual responsibility. The person fasting and praying must remain open and keenly aware that he might be chosen by the Great Mystery as a holy person, as a great and heroic warrior, as one cursed with a handicap, or have any number of other vocational responsibilities. Depending on the tribe and its traditions, the vision quest may be a relatively short-term experience. It may indicate nothing at all. Or it may require the most arduous type of life, requiring the greatest of personal sacrifices.25

24 Ibid., 65. 25 Vine Deloria, Jr., God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (Golden: Fulcrum Publishing, 2003), 196. 64

Deloria notes that many tribes, such as the Iroquois and the Cherokee, have “sophisticated systems for dream interpretations.”26 Imagining that he has traveled away from his homeland,

John tells Salomé, “I don’t even know if I’m here. Sure don’t feel like Palestine. I got prophet- head. Can’t stay in a time-frame.”27 While the theological John the Baptist experienced visions that transcended time and space, Ehn specifically places this iteration of the prophet within the

U.S. Southwest and sets him alongside a Native American helper, Jim Thorpe, who traverses the wilderness with a diner waitress masked as a bear. Deloria also emphasizes that an individual who goes on a vision quest must often make a sacrifice for the community, which John seeks to accomplish for Salomé (and ultimately fails) when he infiltrates Herod’s b-b-q event. Like

John’s treks into the wilderness, these vision quests are pilgrimages where individuals seek to uncover sacred purposes for themselves and their communities.

There are several iconic figures in the play, but Ehn gives particular attention to Jim

Thorpe’s spiritual experience in the desert, especially in the relationship he forges with a bear- woman that, in some ways, parallels the relationship between John and Salomé. The female spirit, who is also a waitress at a diner that Thorpe frequents, has a more egalitarian relationship with Thorpe than Salomé does with John. Thorpe relies on the animal spirit’s guidance whereas

John will not listen to Salomé’s concerns regarding anything. As John begins to disclose his visions to Salomé, Ehn shifts the method of storytelling so that the audience can see the visions embodied through performers. Ehn describes “a Native American [Jim Thorpe] crosses to a lake and drinks like a deer.”28 Thorpe searches for a stream atop the mesa that apparently does not

26 Ibid. 27 Ehn, Locus, 66. 28 Ibid., 67. 65

exist; however, the Waitress “enters wearing a bear’s head; she stands before Jim.”29 The narrator describes

The spirit guide stands in front of him. A bear—it plucks up a trout, which is the hand of the river. Abrupt and stiff. As tensely moral as any miracle. The fish points to the top of the mesa, and Jim climbs in the wind. Blistered in the nicotine sand.30 Here in the desert, the bear-woman points Thorpe toward a place that will provide a respite, and nourishment, from the heat; she orchestrates Thorpe’s survival, despite other characters thinking that he will exhaust himself to death. Additionally, Thorpe only discovers the water and the trout, because, in his words, “I eat no food at all. The world wishes me elsewhere.”31 John is constantly searching for water in the desert in order to baptize Salomé. In Thorpe’s case, however, this female guide leads Thorpe to his destiny that the mythical stream on the mesa contains. When Thorpe finally reaches the top of the mesa, he, referencing his athletic legacy, says, “I see red in the stream and I see my life flowing away[…]I stand simultaneous with the moment of all my loss. Look how old I am! And I am so sad. And I am not afraid. And I become something else.”32 While he dies at the end of this vision, “cut by wind-sword from the mesa,”33 Ehn makes it clear that Thorpe passes into another state of being. This transition in consciousness does not reflect a “transcendent” Judeo-Christian ascendancy into a heaven or hell, but rather, an “immanent” melding into the natural world. John’s opportunity for redress emerges through this experience with Thorpe, and he can now approach the afterlife with an indigenous understanding that could suture Catholicism’s relationship to Native American beliefs.

29 Ibid., 70. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 66

In Native American cosmologies, animals can frequently access alternative realities and even lead humans into them. Animals have specific spirits who guard their species, and they possess crucial knowledges that contribute to an overall creative participation with the environment. According to Deloria,

Tribal religions find a great affinity among species of living creatures, and it is at this point that the fellowship of life is a strong part of the Indian way. The Hopi, for example, revere not only the lands on which they live but the animals with which they have a particular relationship.34 Therefore, Native American cosmologies conceive of animals as beings who are not subordinate to humans. Among the Skidi Pawnee Indians who highly revere the Bear spirit, as Ehn’s Thorpe does35, bears play specific roles in mythology. Bears have the ability to resurrect humans and other entities, and they possess wisdom from the supreme deity May Tirawa that can help humans see “the order of things.”36

Thorpe is also entrenched in U.S. American sports iconography, since over the years he

“has achieved legendary status” among many non-Native Americans.37 However, Thorpe accrued notoriety shortly after his Olympic wins when the committee revoked his medals, since he played on other semi-professional teams. Eventually, Thorpe finds solace through the spirits in the desert. This connection with nature immortalizes Thorpe more so than the cultural legacy with his Olympic triumphs. Though the wind makes his body invisible, Thorpe’s death allows him to pass into another reality and participate in the natural cycles of the cosmos.

This vision and the men that John sees empower him to muster the bravery to risk his life, and, ultimately, die. He refers to the men in his visions as

34 Deloria, God Is Red, 88. 35 The historical Jim Thorpe was raised in the Sac and Fox Nation in Oklahoma. They frequently refer to themselves as the Thakiwaki, which means “people who come forth from the water.” 36 Gregory Cajete, Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence (Santa Fe: Clear Light Publishers, 2000), 155. 37 Mark Rubinfeld, “The mythical Jim Thorpe: Re/presenting the twentieth century American Indian”, The International Journal of the History of Sport, 2006, 168. 67

“my heroes. I see my heroes who are blown away” and he tells Salomé, “I been dead so long, and nothing in my head is in my time. There should be justice, or the future, and I must broadcast. I will not know the justice, or the future, or the signal reception while I’m a living thing.”38 John lives through visions and repeats his sacrifice for Salomé. John refers to his visions as iterations of the “end of the things”39 constantly leading to an ultimate destruction, which Salomé intensely resists. Perhaps, if Salomé refuses to comply with Herod’s wishes, John will find solace in the afterlife. Therefore, his subjectivity rests in how he can control Salomé’s decisions.

John tries to violently prevent Salomé from leaving his mobile home, even though he justifies his militancy as a way to get her to act independently around Herod. She dances to please Herod, but John instructs: “Go ahead and dance, if you want to. But don’t dance his way. For him. It’s embarrassing. At least dance your way.”40 John contests the oppressive structure of Salomé’s performances, as she obeys Herod’s desires, even as he prescribes his own desires for her that do not necessarily honor her intentions. While Salomé appears conflicted between her relationships with John and her father, she flees John and requests his head.

John’s sacrifice is a moment that seeks to disrupt the subordinate position that Salomé has under her father’s reign, yet he fails to achieve his desires. Despite the slew of visions and the magnitude of John’s begging, Salomé’s performance still gains her the privilege to request

John’s head on a “nice silver platter.”41 Ehn’s play calls attention to the patriarchal framework within which Salomé must survive, although he refuses to (re)construct her purely as John’s malicious enemy. Salomé comments that even if John wants justice in this world, he must contend with Herod since “It’s my dad who brings the hammer down[…]And if you’re

38 Erik Ehn, Locus, 70. 39 Ibid., 77. 40 Ibid., 67. 41 Ibid., 74. 68

broadcasting justice, John, then you’re out.”42 Regardless of her inner motivations, Salomé realizes that Herod is politically in control. Even outside of a political context, Salomé challenges John’s perhaps misplaced sense of justice for which he is suffering (i.e., the need to baptize individuals, especially against their will). While Salomé is sympathetic to John and continues to visit him in his isolation in the desert, she is reluctant to confront his visions and defy her father in any tangible way. Ehn does not create a Salomé that sides with John; rather, he focuses on her inner conflict. She listens to John’s prophetic ramblings, but even more so than being afraid to defy her father, Salomé does not trust John in lieu of Herod. While she stays with John during the descriptions of his visions, Salomé is resistant to the information, edging away and proclaiming, “I don’t want to hear all about the end of things, John the Baptist!”43

Salomé seeks to escape John’s prophecies that John believes will occur, even though he cannot let go until he baptizes her.

While Ehn removes a portion of Salomé’s Biblical culpability in orchestrating John the

Baptist’s death, he nonetheless configures her as a woman, nearly devoid of spirituality, who requires saving, or at least security, from two opposing male forces. Ehn highlights the patriarchal confines that dictate Salomé’s actions, but does not allow her to express much agency beyond these strictures. However, this removal of culpability does not necessarily improve

Salomé’s role in the narrative. Rather, by removing culpability, Ehn removes much of her agency and the commitment to beheading John that she demonstrates in the Gospels. Salomé does not have an opportunity for much reflection on her predicament, which is the greater problem. Recalling Dyer’s configuration of male/female spirituality that I mentioned above, the male characters expect Salomé to remain silent and abide by their demands. Dyer argues,

42 Ibid., 73. 43 Ibid. 69

women must adhere to “passivity, expectancy, receptivity, a kind of sacred readiness”44, which configures them as less spiritual or spiritually weaker than men. According to Dyer’s structures of whiteness in Christianity, men experience a “divided nature and internal struggle between mind (God) and body (man), and of suffering as the supreme expression of both spiritual and physical striving.”45 John must suffer through his passion for Salome, especially, the need to baptize her, which becomes a form of control. The baptism is a way for John to coerce Salomé, and thus to consolidate his power over her as a representative woman. The binary that Dyer articulates exists within the play through the depictions of an intense male spirituality conflicting with a female passivity that is unable to handle religiosity or think outside of patriarchal binaries.

Ultimately, Ehn constructs an opportunity for John to make redress through the vision that features Thorpe and the bear-woman who share knowledge that fosters Thorpe’s spiritual transition from the material to immaterial world. However, John does not access the indigenous knowledge that Thorpe does in the vision, and by the time that Herod beheads John, John understands that he will wander, and “the headless body will hunt the head,”46 which hardly parallels the spiritual surrender to an immanent cosmology that Thorpe discovers on the mesa.

John is unable to interpret the meaning behind his visions, and he instead just insists on forcing

Salomé to listen to them. Visions speak to John yet he does not listen to them or seek to understand how they should inform his actions. Instead, he tries to forcefully baptize her in desperation before he dies, clinging to his transcendent beliefs that repudiate Thorpe, and, therefore disallow the possibility joining with the environmental cycles that perpetuate the earth.

In Locus, the Native American and Judeo-Christian cosmologies, and thus the immanent and

44 Richard Dyer, White, 17. 45 Ibid. 46 Ehn, Locus, 76. 70

transcendent polarities, remain isolated from each other, even though there is an opportunity to reconcile them, because John refuses to relinquish his patriarchal (and colonial) drive to dictate

Salomé’s actions. While John depends on Salomé to stay his execution, Ehn demonstrates that

John elects to enter Herod’s territory, which secures his demise. Ehn exposes John’s inability to venture outside his own limited worldview that fails to respect women on an egalitarian level and that refuses to honor the environment, which could potentially heal the fractures between Native

American and Catholic understandings of the world.

While Ehn’s John the Baptist fails to accomplish redress for women and Native

Americans, Ehn deploys characters in Cedar who struggle with redress more directly, and ultimately, St. John of the Cross abides by the Virgin of Guadalupe’s words, which defy his own religious expectations. The role of women (specifically, Native American women) in Cedar shifts dramatically in the relationship between St. John of the Cross and the Virgin of Guadalupe who arrives in his cell to help him die. Set historically in the 16th century, the same century that oversaw the initial colonization of Native peoples in the Americas, the play envisions the

Spanish saint’s arrest shortly after he causes an uprising in Ubeda with St. Theresa of Avila. He wastes away in a prison until the Virgin of Guadalupe, visits him in order to help him pass away from the material world. While John believes the Virgin will provide an escape route from the prison, she instructs that she will help him “to die in here, John. John of the Cross.”47

Guadalupe does not seek to continue John’s political life; rather, she will usher him into a Native iteration of the afterlife. However, his death in the play, which is a result of his sacrifice for political reform among Catholics in Spain, does not include a journey to heaven or even an afterlife. As with Locus, Ehn imagines a cosmology that operates in lieu of or alongside the

47 Erik Ehn, Cedar, in The Saint Plays, ed. Gautam Dasgupta and Bonnie Marranca (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2000), 131. 71

traditional Judeo-Christian narrative. After John dies, Guadalupe notes that, while he is dismembered, “he with lilies sleeps.”48 John’s destiny, much like Thorpe’s in Locus, is to become one with the environment. There is also the constant reference to “cedar”, the play’s name, which is the type of wood in which John is buried by the end his life. This merging with the environment prevents John’s ascent experience into heaven, and instead, he embraces an immanent cosmology. His revolutionary actions are not only doctrinal; his death revises his theological beliefs as well, which completes his impulse to reform Catholicism.

In the play, John’s connections to St. Theresa and visitations from the Guadalupe intimately connect him with the feminine forces of social and spiritual change. In the 1560s, the

Spanish nun St. Theresa of Avila joined the Carmelite Order, along with St. John of the Cross, and orchestrated a series of religious and economic reforms for the poor in Spain that irritated the

Spanish aristocracy. However, it was ultimately St. John’s dissident poetic and prose writings that incited the Inquisition to imprison him. According to historian Gerald Brenan in St John of the Cross: His Life and Poetry, St. John was

delated49 to the Inquisitions of Seville, Toledo and Valladolid at the same time as Gracián and other Carmelites who followed a similar method of mental prayer, on the charge of practising the alumbro or illuminist heresy.50 His dissident religious practices, informed by St. Theresa and other Spanish mystics, resulted in the accusations of heresy that placed him in prison where he eventually died. Further, Brenan notes that the Inquisition, supposedly, destroyed many of his theological writings, since they challenged doctrinal views on prayer in the Roman Catholic Church. Brenan, along with other historians, suspects that “one of [John’s] brother friars”51 undoubtedly informed the Inquisition about his writings and reform activities. These friars, whom Ehn references in Cedar, are

48 Ibid.,133. 49 According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “to delate” means to “report (an offence or crime).” 50 Gerald Brenan, St John of the Cross: His Life and Poetry (London: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 77. 51 Ibid., 78. 72

complicit in St. John’s suffering and death while imprisoned in Ubeda, Spain in 1591. The

Inquisition tortured St. John for his views that seek to incorporate alternative ways of knowing into the narrow Catholic canon of ritual practices.

Noting St. John’s close relationship to St. Theresa and her leadership in Spain, it is interesting that Ehn deploys the Virgin of Guadalupe rather than a European iteration of Mary.

John dies while the Spanish were enacting colonial violences in the Americas, yet this newly birthed patron saint of Mexico assists someone who is part of the colonial empire. Since St.

John, in the play, must rely on Guadalupe’s knowledge and (healing) skills, Ehn suggests the possibility that there may be reconciliation between these two figures Spanish empire has oppressed. Guadalupe also carries a deep Nahuatl history as she is not only an iteration of Jesus’ mother, but she is Tonantzin, an indigenous earth mother. According to Davíd Carrasco in

Religions of Mesoamerica, in 1531 the Nahuatl Indian Juan Diego witnessed the apparition of “a dark-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe” at Tepeyac, “just ten years after the capital of Tenochtitlan fell to Cortés’s forces.”52 Tepeyac was “the sacred hill dedicated to the Aztec mother goddess,

Tonantzin, who was worshiped throughout the history of the Aztec empire.”53 The Virgin of

Guadalupe’s primary spiritual function is to mediate between her Native American children and the imposed colonial God. She is the “go-between to God the Father” and many Latin American communities “believe that the destiny of the whole community depends on her powers.”54 Ehn maintains Guadalupe’s intermediary function in his play, as she decides how John will discover spiritual peace.

52 Davíd Carrasco, Religions of Mesoamerica: Cosmovision and Ceremonial Centers (Long Grove: Waveland Press, Inc., 1990), 136. 53 Ibid.,137. 54 Ibid.,135. 73

In Cedar, Ehn divides John up into two personages, and the characters refer to the other as “the Man” throughout the play. While it is not explicit that he is John’s double as he roams freely, John claims this man as himself when he resists Guadalupe’s suggestion that he is dying.

He argues that his “freedom walks” plainly, as does Man. Guadalupe responds in kind, “you are here and you are there, in the room, out of the room. Here you are dying. Just because you are dying doesn’t mean you don’t still walk through the city.”55 In this moment, the Virgin opens the possibilities for John to have an immanent life that supersedes the body yet immortalizes him on earth. The nature of John’s sacrifice focuses on repairing a relationship between the Spanish with Native Americans and their sacred knowledges. John is seeking to reform principles of the

Catholic Church; however, his encounter with the Virgin radicalizes his project beyond doctrine as her wisdom allows him to see past Catholicism and into a Native American understanding of the environment and even gender equality.

Guadalupe’s tenderness and wisdom also combat the militant masculine forces that oppress John within the prison. Like the split between John and the Man, there are two

Guadalupes present in the play: a girl and a woman. While the Woman Guadalupe dominates the play and the dialogue with John, the Girl Guadalupe intervenes at crucial moments, such as to provide key information on the torture practices within the prison. While reading the writings of John in his cell, she speaks what he cannot say. The torturous practices include “circular discipline” where the jailer friars “walk a circle around me in the heresy cell; each man strikes me with a leather scourge.”56 These women provide an antithesis to these violences that the priests in Ubeda enact, as the jailers are ordained priests who resist reformation. John’s death reconfigures who can provide spiritual knowledge in a colonial context.

55 Erik Ehn, Cedar, 131. 56 Ibid.,128. 74

However, while Ehn constructs a positive rendition of Guadalupe, there are, similar to

Locus, undercurrents that negate this reconciliation between Spanish and Mexican, colonizer and colonized, man and woman. Guadalupe may possess the crucial knowledge that will enlighten

John and foster his spiritual growth; however, she only finds subjectivity (in this play) through her relationship (and service) to John.57 As Dyer reminds us, the Judeo-Christian religious structures expect native women to embody “passivity, expectancy, receptivity” in order to fulfill their sacred purposes in this world. Dyer also mentions that motherhood is “the supreme fufilment of one’s nature,”58 and even though Guadalupe does not have a child in the play, like the Virgin Mary, she functions as not only Jesus’ mother but as a mother for all humanity.

Indeed, she fulfills a mother role for John who must bear a sacrificial mantle. In “La Malinche as Palimpsest II,” Sandra Messinger Cypess argues that the “Virgin of Guadalupe embodies the most virtuous feminine attributes: forgiveness, succor, piety, virginity, saintly submissiveness,”59 all characteristics of Ehn’s rendition, which contribute to creating narrow role(s) for women in a religious capacity. These roles are often subordinate to what men can accomplish, even if they sometimes rely on women to gain certain knowledges.

During the early colonial years in Mexico and Peru, Spanish men frequently married

Native women in order establish economic and political connections with the recently defeated

Aztec and Incan rulers. Ehn’s play focuses on the spiritual relationship between John and

Guadalupe, but John’s dependence on her recalls the historical narrative of Spanish men using women for specific personal gains. In her essay “Colonial Sexuality,” Karen Vieira Powers explores the exploitation between Spanish men and indigenous women. In post-Cortés and post-

57 In other Saint Plays, such as Wholly Joan’s or Tree of Hope, Keep Firm, Ehn deploys women protagonists that exercise greater agency than when they are placed next to male protagonists. 58 Richard Dyer, White, 17. 59 Sandra Messinger Cypess, “La Malinches as Palimpsest II”, in The History of the Conquest of New Spain, ed. Davíd Carrasco (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), 429. 75

Pizarro societies, “men were able to gain access to the important economic resources and political alliances of indigenous noble families through temporary relationships of concubinage with their daughters and saw no reason to marry these women.”60 John beautifully dies and escapes earthly suffering through Guadalupe who contiuously receives cuts “in strange places”61, such as her eyes, from her experiences in the prisons. John may depend on her but she suffers in order to help men.

Ehn counters gender and racial stereotypes in his plays Locus and Cedar through representations of saint sacrifices. In Locus, John the Baptist seeks to rupture Salome’s dependent relationship on Herod, and he prepares for this sacrifice through an intimate vision experience with the Native American Jim Thorpe. However, rather than really liberating

Salomé, he is trying to dictate her decisions. In Cedar, the Spanish St. John of the Cross is dependent on the Mexican patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe, and he realizes he must accept death and alternative forms of existence within his theological beliefs. Yet again, Ehn

(re)inscribes a particular history of power relations between Spanish men and indigenous women that subverts his installment of Guadalupe to a position of total spiritual power. Therefore, while

Ehn creates a space for female agency, his religious tropes ultimately undercut their agency.

Returning to my comments at the beginning of this chapter on immanence and transcendence, Ehn merges these Catholic icons with indigenous American characters, and, ultimately, demonstrates the necessity for Catholics to gain knowledge from the indigenous. As

Berman notes, the pre-agricultural societies view of the sacred is “diffuse” and “horizontal” in relationship to the natural environment rather than concentrated on salvation or physicially rising into heaven. There is no fight for salvation; instead, individuals continue to influence the world

60 Karen Vieira Powers, “Colonial Sexuality: Of Women, Men, and Mestizaje” in The History of the Conquest of New Spain, ed. Davíd Carrasco (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008), 411. 61 Ehn, 129. 76

either as spirits (i.e., Thorpe) or as part of the physical earth (i.e., St. John of the Cross). In addition, the rise of civilization coincides with regulation of the female body as “women’s political and economic power declines” and “mothering, once part of female life, now becomes the focus of that life.”62 While Locus demonstrates John’s inability to accept Thorpe’s experience in the immaterial world, Cedar focuses more directly on spiritual healing through the death of

John of the Cross, and it inevitably considers the opportunities for racial and ethnic redress from colonizer to colonized. Ehn’s John the Baptist receives the call for redress, to resist his attempt to baptize Salomé who refuses to help him, and he finally passes into an afterlife that is dictated by constant unrest. Ehn’s St. John of the Cross, however, works with the Mexican Virgin, surrenders to her instructions, and becomes part of the earth. His political redress for Catholic crimes against other Catholics is instead reconfigured into a theological and cultural redress that is only complete through his sacrifice.

62 Berman, 148. 77

CONCLUSION

Through this Master’s thesis, I hope I have demonstrated the possibilities for white male subjects to make redresses for past wrongs against racialized and gendered “others.” Further, I hope my readers understand the value that a sacred return to indigenous cosmologies can play in this process. While I have explored the potentiality for Celtic/Germanic indigenous religions in

Jerusalem and Catholicism in the Saint Plays to intervene politically in contemporary conversations surrounding redress, there is more that I would like to explore with this project. I touched briefly on the roles of women in the plays, and I think this needs greater attention. As I mentioned in the Jerusalem chapter, I support Rooster’s masculinist ritual that seeks to agitate the powers that threaten his forest home; however, there needs to be a deeper examination of how Butterworth deploys female characters, beyond Phaedra, alongside the primarily male cast.

With Ehn’s work, several Saint Plays use female sacrificial subjects, such as Wholly Joan, that I would like to parse out further in order to demonstrate the ways in which Ehn deploys women as protagonists. Ideally, I would like to craft a larger academic project that considers detailed analyses of performance art pieces where I can write more on the actual performances of white sacrifice, such as Peter van Heerden’s work. In addition, if I were to craft this project again or if

I were to write a second thesis, I would largely examine performance art pieces and rituals through a Performance Studies lens rather than a textually dependent one. There were advantages in studying just the texts. The Prose Edda and Poetic Edda provided such vivid accounts of mythology that I could theorize religious signifiers in Rooster’s actions, especially with the amount of archaeological evidence that I researched. Similarly, moments from the

Judeo-Christian scriptures and illuminated John the Baptist’s plight in Locus. However, for this conclusion, I want to consider the potential performance possibilities of risking privileges to

78

estrange whiteness from its place of power so that readers can engage in dismantling white supremacist thinking beyond the Academy.

I orient my own political subjectivity around my gay Latino identity, but as a man who irrefutably possesses white privileges because of my phenotype, whiteness is not something that

I can ignore in everyday representation. Thus, even though my mestizo subject position shapes my consciousness, my artistic interests, and my political activism, I must account for my white body, especially when I am engaging in Latina/o communities1. While I did not ask for white skin nor request the privileges that come with it, white people must understand that, regardless of how guilty they do not want to feel, there is political power that comes with whiteness. In concert with my views in this thesis, I argue that since this power takes economic and social privileges in the United States, there is a white responsibility to dismantle dominative power structures in our society. In White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son, Tim

Wise writes

As for the concept of privilege, here too, clarification is in order. I am not claiming, nor do I believe, that all whites are wealthy and powerful. We live not only in a racialized society, but also in a class system, a patriarchal system, and one of straight supremacy, able-bodied supremacy, and Christian hegemony. These other forms of privilege, and the oppression by those who can’t access them, mediate but never fully eradicate something like white privilege[…]the fact remains that whiteness matters and carries great advantage.”2 While there is room to critique white privilege and the tangible results that it provides women,

LGBTQ individuals, or people in lower classes, there is no denying that whiteness carries particular benefits that persons of other races do not receive. As entrenched as whiteness may be

1 Of course, since Latinas/os are not exclusively one “race”, conversations surrounding whiteness are pervasive throughout Latin America. For example, John Leguizamo, a Colombian-American playwright and actor, grew up in Puerto Rican neighborhoods as a child, yet he frequently comments in his autobiographical pieces, such as Freak, on the marriage between his subaltern ethnicity and his passing whiteness. Bringing in a more theoretical approach, Ramón Grosfugel writes, “no matter how blonde or blue-eyed people may be or whether they can otherwise pass as white, the moment they identify themselves as Puerto Rican, they enter the labyrinth of racial otherness” (Grosfugel 108). 2 Tim Wise, White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a Privileged Son (Berkeley: Soft Skull Press, 2011), xiii- xiv. 79

in a myriad of subject positions, as Wise points out, white privilege persists, enabling white people in lower classes to advance over people of color in lower classes or white women to occupy feminist movements rather than black women.

Similarly, within popular culture, such as film, television, and the theatre, there is an over-representation of white bodies,3 particularly in sacrifice, instead of a conscious effort to replace white heroes with people of color when it would culturally make sense to do so. For example, in the 2013 film Elysium, a white man, Max de la Costa, played by Matt Damon, lives within a Chicana/o community in a futuristic Los Angeles. The premise of the film is that humans have severely devastated the Earth’s natural resources, filling it with smog and diseases, and a privileged few (mostly white) have traveled to a giant space station that orbits the planet.

On the Elysium station, the small population lives in large homes, and, more importantly, they possess technology that prevents them from developing any diseases or viruses in their bodies.

Meanwhile, on the over-populated Earth, communities of color are getting overwhelmed with hospital patients and economic inequalities. Therefore, Max, who is an Anglo that grew up in a

Catholic Chicana/o orphanage (thus gaining his Latin surname), volunteers to break into Elysium in order to cure himself from a terminal disease. After epic action sequences and a love affair with a Chicana nurse on Earth, Max accesses the healing technology for the rest of the world, yet he dies in the process. As Claire Sisco King writes in Washed in Blood: Male Sacrifice, Trauma, and the Cinema, emphasizing the required white bodies, “Consonant with most ritualized sacrificial practices, sacrificial films depend on male victim-heroes—for much of what is at stake

3 Indeed, “white are everywhere in representation. Yet precisely because of this and their placing as norm they seem not to be represented to themselves as whites but as people who are variously gendered, classed, sexualised and abled” (Dyer 3). 80

in sacrificial rites is the negotiation and redefinition of the masculine norms of the social body.”4

Even though most of the main characters on Earth are people of color, the film still deploys a white protagonist to save everyone, and his death validates their existences as well as their hope in the future. The film refuses to risk white privilege, since it still takes whiteness for granted as a universal body that can save “humanity”, rather than as an individual body that is situated as a racial context; the film, then, suggests that only whites can save the whole community, but a

Chicanas/os cannot save themselves or members of other racial backgrounds. The film’s creators manuever the story so that a white man can vouch for a Chicana/o community rather than cast a man (or woman) who is Chicano.

Instead of neglecting the presence of whiteness and just viewing it as human, I suggest that we need to presence race in a way that estranges it from its universal position in performance. Since white bodies possess incontrovertible privileges in the world, it is crucial for white people to risk privileges in order reconfigure whiteness and its expansive position of power. Unlike the previous examples, this functions as a form of sacrifice that brings attention to racial inequalities rather than reinscribe them. As Wise notes, “white folks in the Northeast or the West Coast—oh god, especially the West Coast—find it hard to imagine that racism is an issue there too. And when you tell them it is, prepare for the backlash because it’s surely coming.”5 As Wise experiences during his speaking engagements, the presencing of white privilege before white audiences engenders angry responses, because many do not want to acknowledge that they are entrenched in a system that favors whiteness. In my own online work this past semester, I decided to post articles on Facebook that confronted white privilege. My aim, of course, was to facilitate civil dialogues between mostly white people who perhaps had

4 Claire Sisco King, Washed in Blood: Male Sacrifice, Trauma, and the Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 4. 5 Wise, 190. 81

not thought about their race-based privileges. During February 2014, I posted a quote per day from famous African-American civil rights activists, such as Audre Lorde, Fred Hampton, and

Assata Shakur. I purposefully chose militant quotes rather than the generic passive ones often presented during Black History Month.

Within the first few days, I posted a quote from James Baldwin that incited an uproar among my family members. The quote was from a statement Baldwin made about white pedagogy in relationship to African-American students in the United States:

The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in America never had any interest in educating black people, except as this could serve white purposes. It is not the black child’s language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: It is his experience. A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have lost too many black children that way. While Baldwin certainly acknowledges problems with public education funding and accessibility, in this quote he is pointing out how white teachers do not properly understand or value Black experiences, which therefore curbs their ability to teach Black students. This quote quickly incited my white, heterosexual uncle (in-law) James, who grew up in the projects of southern Georgia, and he responded, “One person's opinion, for look at the programs that are in place for anyone who desires to learn. All it takes is initiative, join the real world.” In other words, James is saying that any individual can access the necessary education opportunities in order to succeed and achieve the “American Dream.” First, he misses the entire point of the quote, since Baldwin is not only implicating educational programs that exist in inner city spaces; rather, Baldwin is exposing the idea that white educators do not value the black experience in their schools or in literature or in history. This devaluation, then, contributes to poor treatment of African-American students, physically and intellectually. My uncle’s comments decentered the conversation from institutional oppressions and prejudices, and he placed all burden on the

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victims, the individuals, to educate themselves through this plethora of government assistance programs that apparently exists in surplus. It is interesting to note that this uncle, whom I have never known well, did not regularly communicate with me on Facebook prior to this incident.

However, the moment that I attacked a site of privilege, he bolted to my Facebook page in order to dismiss my post and then tell me that I needed to “join the real world.”6

The practice of posting these Facebook quotes was my attempt to facilitate civil dialogues between people of various communities (family, university, theatre colleagues, etc.), yet this incident and several succeeding ones have created conflicts throughout my family, and nine months later, several of my aunts and uncles are not even speaking to each other. The issue goes beyond the Facebook quotes and instead are a result of how people speak to or treat each other on and off digital spaces, but the quotes are certainly the origin. I do not position myself as a victim or a martyr, but my decision to share these African-American voices in a public space

(rather than, say, pictures of food and pets) engendered hostility between my family members

6 While it is not immediately relevant to my conclusion, I thought I should share my response to my uncle, who later defriended me from Facebook: “Hey Uncle James--First, you're right that there are many programs that exist to assist children of color all over the United States. But we also have to be aware that these programs are limited and not always accessible. Where are these programs on the Native American reservations? How many programs like this are available in Harlem? How many programs are there for LGBTQ children who've been thrown out of their homes because they are gay or lesbian? How many programs are there in rural areas where Latinos live to harvest grapes that poison their bodies? While progressions have certainly occurred in this country, many inequalities still exist. Just drive down I-10 in New Orleans and you'll see testaments to the gentrification of African-American communities that extend beyond just seizing "initiative." And it isn't programs that the Baldwin quote is even critiquing...He's critiquing the devaluation of the Black experience in this country which persists in the national psyche. In graduate school, I have dedicated my studies to African-American and Latino/a histories in the United States. So my knowledge and my experience are not speaking into a historical vacuum. But your comment on my post just proves Baldwin's point. You immediately discarded his experience with your comment, which is what he's arguing. Let me point out a few things: You're white. You're a man. You're heterosexual. Therefore, your embodied experiences command certain privileges. I'm sure you've struggled in your own life, but your upper-middle class lifestyle allows for you to NOT see certain oppressions. And I see these everyday where I work, not just in impoverished communities but in the university setting. My point with this Black History Month project is to commemorate and share the experiences of crucial African- American activists who have fought, and even died, for civil rights. I encourage debate and alternative thoughts on what I post. But I also hope to encourage listening and the possibility of entertaining someone else's experience. Please, let's maintain a dialogue.”

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and spiralled into several altercations where my aunts, uncles, and cousins have now politicized themselves even further based on their conservative or liberal perspectives regarding racism, sexism, and homophobia. In a sense, my actions, or performace online, “sacrificed” normalcy and disturbed my relatively comfortable, suburban family. The question I continue to ask is,

“was it worth it?” Part of me thinks that my family thrives on conflict and it was only a matter of time before some issue, social or personal, divided them. As a student at Florida State, many of the succeeding confrontations occurred in Texas without my presence. But regardless of

“worth”, there is no doubt that this incident created long-term effects beyond minor family squabbles.

The Facebook activism provoked people outside my family (although the long-term repercussions were not nearly as dramatic), even if I just posted articles that challenged white people’s “right” to say the N-word or contested the ethics of having Jared Leto, a straight cis- man, playing a transgender character in The Dallas Buyer’s Club. While I resisted hostility on my part, many people responded angrily, and they often would not engage in a productive conversation. Generally, the people who had problems with the materials I posted were white, straight, and many were also men. Particularly interesting, many of them were individuals who identified as liberal, too. I would not say that reaching people through Facebook and other online spaces is useless, as many people of color responded positively, but it is clear to me that the work must evolve beyond intelligently-written articles from radical voices. This, potentially, is where theatre and performance art can intervene, since they display realities that encourage empathy outside one’s own subject position rather than just pontificating about an issue (most of the time).

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As I move on from this Master’s degree into teaching summer theatre camps in Corpus

Christi and writing/producing creative work, I am constantly pondering how to invent methods to raise discussions about race that do not neglect whiteness’ implications in systemic oppressions.

In my own creative work, it is simpler to incorporate these discussions, for my Chicano-based performance pieces call attention to my white mestizo identity, especially when I am performing in them. However, college campuses and political organizations are colonial spaces that require more creativity when thinking how to intervene. But intervention is necessary in the theatre and performance realms, for, as David Savran points out in Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity,

Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture, fictional texts “are particularly important for the production of hegemony, representing sites at which a wide range of ideologies and values can be visualized, reaffirmed, and challenged.”7 Teaching the politics of representation in theatre, film, and television, as well as writing critical responses, as Jill Dolan does with her

Feminist Spectator blog, become necessary forms of activism to rupture the immense hold that whiteness possesses in our media and throughout Western literary traditions.

Returning to Richard Dyer, especially in the context of my own teaching and performance pedagogies, I want to avoid empowering whiteness by giving it too much attention.

Dyer refers to this as “me-too-ism” and he fears that his own theoretical work could give “white people the go-ahead to write and talk about what in any case we have always talked about: ourselves” (10). Even if the intention is to challenge whiteness, there remains the issue that scholars and practitioners could entrench themselves so heavily into white dialogues that they ignore relationships to people of color. Dyer’s whole book is avowedly problematic because he tries to assess whiteness on its own terms rather than seeking to explore its existence as

7 David Savran, Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 7. 85

contingent on “non-white” people. Another major issue, particularly in teaching circles, is productively confronting and moving past “white guilt.” Dyer writes,

One wants to acknowledge so much how awful white people have been that one may never get around to examining what exactly they have been, and in particular, how exactly their image has been constructed, its complexities and contradictions.8 Recently, a graduate student told me that, since he was Jewish and Irish, he did not need to feel guilty for the atrocities of white Anglo-Americans. I responded, “Your ancestors, Jews and the

Irish included, fought their way into white privilege; thus, you are part of the system that orchestrated the Trail of Tears and African-American slavery.” The most important thing I can say on this subject, particularly to white readers, is this: the guilt does not matter. The white tears behind past violences are, ultimately, irrelevant. Sure, white people need to confront their history and get emotional about it, but the need to mobilize and dismantle white supremacy is far more urgent. Of course, this all comes down to methodology and how we approach dismantling whiteness through redress. This ethic does not simply arise from educating white students about the atrocities of white privilege in the history of the United States, and the world, but rather, teachers and artists must outline a practice that seeks to restore what whiteness has erased in a way that ruptures racism, sexism, and homophobia. There is where the risk lies: the ability to create work that not only educates but envisions utopic possibilites.

This project has only refined my performance, teaching, and scholarly writing, which are crucial interventions in discussions on racism, gender, and indigeneity. While Butterworth’s

Jerusalem cast is white and Ehn is writing white characters in both Locus and Cedar, they do not explicitly say this in the cast list nor do they mention whiteness in the plays. I stand by my arguments that they are, whether they recognize it or not, troubling the roles of white masculinity in relationship to sacrifice in indigenous and other religious contexts. Rooster’s devotion to an

8 Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 11. 86

indigenous-influenced life in the woods inspires his militant, anti-capitalist actions that seek to thwart Avon’s deforestation, and Ehn’s characters attempt to heal the wounds between the colonizers and the colonized. They do not, however, go as far as performance artist Peter van

Heerden who crafts his pieces around estranging white audiences and condemning their uses of privilege. He not only deploys sacrifice in his pieces, but he does so in order to make redress for white violence against the indigenous populations and the environment of South Africa. And in this vein of creative work is where most of my future interest lies in critical race discussions. In addition to teaching, I want to continue the work I have begun with this thesis through my own playwriting and performance practice which I have initiated during graduate school. Van

Heerden’s work provides the most abrasive confrontation between white privilege and its benefactors, and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s self-reflection of his own performances are where artists can fuse an artistic and scholarly ethic. While this thesis focuses on the redress necessary to resurrect the indigenous practices of Europe, my creative practice reflects my specific subject position as a white, gay Latino exploring the act of sacrifice in order to initiate redress for the racism, homophobia, and sexism that has infiltrated Latina/o cultures since Spanish colonization.

And this is the work we must continue: estranging whiteness from power, through sacrifice, through indigenous reclamation, through calling out the subtle residues of white power in

Western political, social, and private spaces.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Josh Inocéncio is a playwright, performer, and director who focuses on queer and indigenous reclamations within Latina/o cultures. He’s an artist/scholar who’s passionate about blending art and activism in his work. He completed his Bachelor’s degree in Theatre at Texas A&M University—Corpus Christi where he directed productions of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Moliere’s The Imaginary Invalid. As a graduate student at The Florida State University, he has directed The War Boys by Naomi Wallace at the 621 Gallery in Tallahassee, and he wrote and performed an original play, tezcat y quetzal: ¡decolonize la jotería!, with BFA Acting student Andres Robledo.

During August 2014, Josh traveled on a book tour with playwright Virginia Grise to several cities in South Texas in order to promote her play The Panza Monologues that she co-wrote with Dr. Irma Mayorga. Josh also worked for two years as a teaching assistant for both non-majors and majors at FSU, and during summer 2014 he crafted a performance art workshop for high school students at TAMUCC’s Camp on the Coast. In Spring 2015, the final semester of his Master’s program at FSU, Josh launched his first original full-length play, Purple Eyes, a solo auto/biography that explores the intersections between queerness and machismo in his Chicana/o family.

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